system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What is "Hardware Acceleration" and how does it work?
gpt
Your CPU is a general purpose processor. What that means is that the circuits and low level code for it are designed to be adaptable to perform a wide variety of calculations easily. This comes at a cost, speed and efficiency. It is possible to build circuits that do only one thing, and do it very well. 

For instance, if your computer didn't have to do deal with integers, it is possible to construct a specialized processor that processes only floating point numbers at much higher speeds. A Graphics processor or GPU is a very good example of this. A GPU is a specialized chip that can perform graphics operations several times faster than your CPU can. So if you had to process graphics, your CPU will hand them off to the GPU and wait for the result. In such a system the graphics are said to be "hardware accelerated", which means that you have specialized hardware to do certain types of processing very fast.

Other examples of common uses for hardware acceleration include movie processing, physics calculation in games and simulations and math processing.