What are the benefits of Graphics Processing Units, or GPUs?

A graphics card or GPU is an essential component in any type of computer, be it a smartphone, tablet, PC, or even a smartwatch. Think of the GPU as a sort of supporting processor. Your CPU manages the computer, launches apps, and manages resources, while the GPUs primary function is to draw stuff on your screen. There’s a lot more nuance to it than that of course. So let’s look at GPUs in more detail.

Primary function of a GPU

The GPU aka Graphics Processing Unit is primarily meant for, as the name indicates, processing graphics. This essentially refers to all the colours and shapes you see on your screen when doing everything from playing games to editing photos to simply browsing the web and bingeing YouTube.

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Without a graphics card, your display will not function. There can be different types of GPUs of course, but in all shapes and forms their primary function is to handle display output.

GPUs for gaming

Games are graphically intensive programs. While your CPU handles aspects like physics, networking, and AI, everything that you see on your screen is painted by a GPU. This GPU not only needs to perform a lot of calculations converting 3D objects to 2D projections (your screen is 2D while in-game objects are usually designed as 3D), it has to calculate how light interacts with said objects, how colours respond to that light, and more. This is a complex process and requires a lot of power, the type that only a GPU can deliver.

GPUs for AI

For the past several years, GPUs have also become the go-to processors for AI calculations. In fact, some of the most popular AI models such as ChatGPT and Dall-E run on GPUs. This is largely because there’s a lot of similarity between the calculations needed for 3D rendering and AI. Graphics cards run hot and consume a lot of power, but they can also get a lot done. I think it’s safe to say that the modern AI boom would have been impossible without GPUs of some kind.

GPUs for watching and editing videos

Another useful feature of GPUs is that they’re usually very good at editing and decoding video files. While a video might not seem like such a demanding file type to work with, you have to remember that a 4K video involves eight million individual pixels being rendered 60 times a second. It takes a lot of processing power to watch a video, and even more to edit one. It’s just that GPUs have become so good at decoding video formats that we have no sense of the effort involved.

GPUs and 3D rendering and modelling

For creative work, especially work that involves 3D modelling and rendering, GPUs are again critical. Their ability to process large volumes of data very quickly, particularly for lighting and textures, is what makes them so good at the job. 3D artists owe their life’s work to the GPU in their PCs.

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While a CPU is perfectly capable of performing the same actions as a GPU, the main difference between the two is that the CPU tends to be orders of magnitude slower than a GPU when it comes to the tasks that a GPU excels at. Whether for gaming, 3D modelling, video editing, and even AI, a GPU is by far the best option.