High efficiency video coding (HEVC), namely H.265, is the latest video coding standard. Compared to the previous generation of video coding standards, H.265/HEVC can significantly improve video compression efficiency. However, it incurs a much higher computational complexity, especially in the intra prediction process. To address this issue, we propose an improved and hardware-friendly gradient-based intra prediction hardware acceleration algorithm which can skip some of the intra prediction modes and the intra prediction process for depth partition, so as to reduce computation. The proposed algorithm can estimate the texture direction and texture complexity of codingunits according to gradient information. The texture direction can be used to estimate the optimal intra prediction direction of the coding-unit, and the texture complexity can determine whether to skip the intra-prediction process for the current depth partitioning. Experimental results show that compared with the HEVC test model HM16.18, the proposed algorithm can reduce  encoding time by 60.59%, with only 8.52% BD-rate increase and 0.38dB BD-PSNR decrease.