Thread: Is there a tool for matching the best GPU to your CPU?

Originally Posted by vectus

Of course if you perform tasks that are process heavy (multiple apps, video encoding/rendering) then a newer processor would definitely help out.

And that's not even guaranteed really. If you are using software that is cuda or avivo enabled, then the gpu is doing most of the work there as well. GPUs are just flat out faster than the CPU. Ati's 4850 series for instance have 800 stream processors on them. I have almost 2500 stream processors in my machine. The 4890 itself is in the teraflop range of computing power.

Most GPUs don't do anything when it comes to encoding. They're strictly used for decoding. Typically, encoding is handled strictly by the capture card at a hardware level or by the CPU.

Yes. GPU encoding is relatively new. And it's limited to very specific software to do so. I've seen as much as an 800% increase in speed in encoding over CPU based encoding/converting of video.

There's a really small set of software that use the GPU for anything other than graphics, but the list is growing all the time. SETI@home is on that uses the GPU now and it can process data SOOOOO much faster than cpu alone.

Yes it is a boon to modeling in systems science as well. Protein folding, neural networks, weather systems, etc. all benefit hugely from the new GPU technology...it is truly amazing. Thank you video gaming!

Yep. Tons of stuff coming out that'll run on a GPU now. Hackers have password cracking utilities that run by a factor of 1000 faster than on CPU. Amazing technology. By in large though, it's very specialized and not something the average Joe would be using.