[Zubersoft]

From what I've read with some Google searches, turning off the hardware overlay can have some negative consequences:

Disable HW overlays

Without a hardware overlay every application that is displaying things on the screen will share video memory and will have to constantly check for collision and clipping to render a proper image, this can cost a lot of processing power. With a hardware overlay each application gets its own portion of video memory, getting rid of the need to check for collision and clipping.

Another user said:

rendering a view goes through layers or abstractions, even passing through dedicated hardware doing the job. hardware overlay allows the renderer to take a couple of regions aside and treat them optimized. then theres the cpu and gpu. usually android decides which abstraction is best for each view, taking things like transparency into account and what not. you switch hw overlays off, project butter goes out of the window but cpu and gpu still do the job. you force gpu, the composition will be done by your gfx chip. just don't touch it - its meant for developers picking up debugging output.


So in general, I wouldn't think it would be a good thing to turn that setting off. Having said that, I'd really like another person to try turning it off to see if it really does help for some reason. In that case, it would be exposing a bug in the OS.

Mike