That is actually rather shocking. In theory, the purpose of hardware decoding is to allow the built in chips designed for decoding this type of information to do the work. This is typically very efficient and provides savings in battery life and system performance. Disabling hardware decoding will force all decoding work to transfer from the designated chips to the processor, which is not only slower, but much less efficient than the chips designed to do the work. I will be very interested to see the outcome of this testing...