Software means to use software to emulate graphics. Hardware means use the PC graphics card to make graphics render faster if you have a graphics card.
They are Automatic, Hardware – GLES 2.0, and Software – GLES 2.0. There are three choices in the drop-down list. Then it will show a lot of detailed settings for this AVD.
AVD Manager menu item is under the Android Device Monitor menu item. Fix Qemu-System-X86_64.Exe Has Stopped Working Error Steps.