Video card render?

altivec_2.0altivec_2.0
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
Not sure were this topic would go, but here it is. Is it possible to use the graphics engine in a graphics card to run along side with a regular CPU. In video renderings, most times (I hope this is right) the main CPU of the computer compiles and renders everything not the video card, or am I wrong. Most of the time the video card isn't being used that much, except for QE. What I'm getting at is, if you were rendering a 35GB project, how could you get the GPU of the video card to help with some of the processing?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    dmband0026dmband0026 Posts: 2,345member
    Even if you could get it to help, it wouldn't do much. The GPU is nothing compared to a CPU. You would see no benefit to this. I don't even know if it is possible.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    mr. thermistormr. thermistor Posts: 20member
    >Is it possible to use the graphics engine in a graphics card to run along

    >side with a regular CPU.



    Not possible.

    Some applications have an option to render with the graphics card for a low quality preview, but not both at the same time.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    karl kuehnkarl kuehn Posts: 756member
    There are actually some places where a graphics card is much faster than the CPU, and there are a number of project out there that use this fact to do some highly specialized calculations on those graphics cards (astronomical calculations seem to lend themselves to this). But these are very specialized cases, and require re-writing a driver for the card to do only that.



    In the vast majority of cases the CPU is much better at rendering files. Even QE simply uses the card to composite the picture (the CPU does all the rendering of windows, gives them to the Graphics card as textures to be applied to a 3d object, and the card then throws them together). This is a nice combination, as it uses the strengths of each processor, and severely limits the amount of data moving out to the card (in comparison a big bottleneck).



    The biggest challenge in doing what you are proposing would be to bring the data back in from the card. AGP is structured to move data from the computer to the card, and is very bad at doing the reverse.
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