WinZip is a powerful compression tool for Windows and Mac. It offers compression and decompression of data, creation of ZIP archives, creation of self-extracting archives, support for many archive file formats and more. It also offers encryption of the archives using very strong ciphers such as AES 256 bit. An archive encrypted with AES 256 bit is simply impossible to be decrypted without the original key or passphrase.
If you use WinZip for encrypting large size files in order to protect and safe guard them from being accessed by strangers, then you might have noticed that it takes a considerably long time for the encryption to complete. This is because, WinZip depends on the CPU to perform all the encryption by default.
However, if you have a powerful graphics card added to your Windows computer, then you can harness the power of the GPU and finish the encryption faster. This is because of the way GPU’s are designed. They can be used to process the data much faster in the case of some mathematical calculations which is what AES demands.
For enabling GPU, we have to first open WinZip settings and then switch to the Advanced section. Here we have to find a sub-section named Performance. Under this sub-section, we can enable the checkbox labeled Enable OpenCL GPU acceleration. Finally, we have to save the settings by clicking on the OK button.
We can make changes to the WinZip settings so that it can use hardware acceleration and give extra load to the system GPU or the graphics card processor. By making these changes, you will see a slight improvement in the performance of WinZip when it is compressing huge amounts of data or when it is encrypting large chunks of data. As anyone can guess, if your GPU is powerful then you will see much more boost in the performance.