Hardware acceleration means using specialized hardware components (like GPUs, TPUs, or NPUs) to perform specific computing tasks more efficiently than a general-purpose CPU alone. It offloads intensive tasks from the CPU to these components to improve overall system performance, reduce latency, increase throughput, reduce power consumption, and enable faster processing. Common use cases include:

• Graphics rendering and video playback (using GPU)
• AI and machine learning processing (using TPUs or NPUs)
• Audio processing (using dedicated sound cards or DSPs)
• Web performance optimization by offloading rendering and video decoding tasks

Enabling "Use hardware acceleration when available" allows software such as browsers to automatically utilize this hardware acceleration for improved performance. This is typically found in settings of web browsers and some other applications, where it is recommended to keep enabled for better speed, energy efficiency, and smoother user experience. However, in cases with low- end hardware or buggy GPU drivers, hardware acceleration may cause issues and can be turned off to improve stability. In summary, hardware acceleration enhances computing efficiency by delegating tasks to specialized hardware, improving performance and energy use, and it is recommended to use it when available unless it causes specific issues.