Graphics Processing Unit: Difference between revisions

GPUs today can execute a lot of programs that formerly only CPUs could, but with radically different performance characteristics. A typical home GPU can run hundreds of threads at once, while a typical mid-range home CPU can run two to4-16 fourthreads. On the other hand, each GPU thread progresses far more slowly than a CPU thread. Thus if you have thousands of almost identical tasks you need to run at once, like many pixels in a graphical scene or many objects in a game with physics, a GPU might be able to do work a hundred times faster than a CPU. But if you only have a few things to do and they have to happen in sequence, a CPU-style architecture will give vastly better performance. As general-purpose GPU programming progresses, GPUs might get used for more and more things until they're nearly as indispensable as CPUs. (OrIndeed, in some tasks a strong GPU is often required: From the late 2010s on, more and more consumer devices include powerful GPUs for things other than gaming, often related to maybemachine notlearning.)

nVidia tried their hands on "real time" ray tracing with the GeForce GTX 480 using a proprietary API. However nVidia's attempts would not see adoption until 2018 with the release of the GeForce 20 series, introducing RTX hardware accelerated ray tracing.