My iPhone 5 plays them with no issues whatsoever fwiw.

GIF decoding has never been hardware-accelerated (as HWA is commonly used in this context, using fixed-function units on silicon taking care of computationally expensive parts of decoding). We (as in the Internet) were laughing at dancing_baby.gif (among all the other GIFs that Geocities page had at the same document) back in 1997 played back on Pentium 2 CPUs.

And animated GIFs are just a bunch of frames indexed with 8bit color, all packed with LZW. It's no h264 to require hardware acceleration and even the latter can be decoded effortlessly without accelearation by modern CPUs.

The benefit of using video in place of these being you don't have to load and play all of them at the same time.