eli5: What does a GPU do when you play a game.
In: Technology
It does lots of simple calculations at the same time. The CPU can basically do any calculation so you can think of it as a generalist. However, CPUs only do one calculation at a time. (They can do billions per second so that’s perfectly fine for most computer tasks.) The GPU can only do a very specific set of calculations but it can do them in parallel. So, you can think of it as a specialist. In a game, that calculation is probably drawing a polygon. The GPU can draw a bunch of polygons at once whereas the CPU would take time to draw them. So, that task is delegated to the GPU.
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