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Using GPUs For General-Purpose Computing

Posted by timothy on from the transfer-of-duties dept.

Paul Tinsley writes "After seeing the press releases from both Nvidia and ATI announcing their next generation video card offerings, it got me to thinking about what else could be done with that raw processing power. These new cards weigh in with transistor counts of 220 and 160 million (respectively) with the P4 EE core at a count of 29 million. What could my video card be doing for me while I am not playing the latest 3d games? A quick search brought me to some preliminary work done at the University of Washington with a GeForce4 TI 4600 pitted against a 1.5GHz P4. My Favorite excerpt from the paper: 'For a 1500x1500 matrix, the GPU outperforms the CPU by a factor of 3.2.' A PDF of the paper is available here."

4 of 396 comments (clear)

  1. Not just the GPU : the RAM by ratboot · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What's interesting with new video cards it's their memory capacity, 128 or 256 MB and that this memory is accessible on some new cards at 900 MHz with a data path of 256 bit (which is a lot faster than a CPU with DDR 400 installed).

  2. Wow by cubicledrone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    All that processing power, and the latest games still run at about 22 frames per second, if that.

    The CPU can do six billion instructions a second, the GPU can do 18 billion, and every last cycle is being used to stuff a 40MB texture into memory faster. What a waste. Yeah, the walls are even more green and slimy. Whoop-de-fucking-do.

    Would it be great if all that processing power could be used for something other than yet-another-graphics-demo?

    Like, maybe some new and innovative gameplay?

    --
    Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
  3. Re:As has been said many time before ... by lazy_arabica · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The GPU are very fast ... at performing vector and matrix calculations. This is the whole point. If general computing CPUs were capable of doing vector or matrix calcs very efficiently, we would probably not have GPUs.
    Yes. But 3D graphics are not the only use of these mathematical objects ; I wonder if it would be possible to use a GPU to perform video encoding or digital sound manipulation at a higher speed, as both operations require matrices. I'm also sure they could take advantage of these processors vector manipulation capabilities.
  4. Commodore 64 by curator_thew · · Score: 5, Interesting


    This concept was being used back in 1988. The Commodore 64 (1mhz 6510, a 6502 like micro processor) had a peripheral 5.25 disk drive called the 1541, which itself had a 1mhz 6510 cpu in it, connected via. a serial link.

    It became common practice to introduce fast loaders: these were partially resident in the C64, and also in the 1541: effectively replacing the 1541's limited firmware.

    However, demo programmers figured out how to utilise the 1541: one particular demo involved uploading program to the 1541 at start, then upon ever screen rewrite, uploading vectors to the 1541, which the 1541 would perform calculations in parallel with the C64, then at the end of the screen, the C64 fetch the results from the 1541, and incorporate them into the next screen frame.

    Equally, GPU provides similar capability if so used.