Need advice on computer build.

[Peter Jason]

I am building one, and recently I see there are NVdia cards
that allow the CPU to use the video card to take over some
of its load. What are the keywords required to ask about
this facility when I buy components?

P

 

[Paul]

I am building one, and recently I see there are NVdia cards
that allow the CPU to use the video card to take over some
of its load. What are the keywords required to ask about
this facility when I buy components?

P

More than one company, has the ability to do computing on their
video cards.

The technical terms used might be: GPGPU, OpenCL, CUDA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpgpu

The GPU on the video card, has "programmable shaders". That
thing has been turned into a processor, that is capable of
running short programs. Since there are many shaders inside
the GPU, it is possible to harness many "processors" at the same
time.

About the best speedup I've heard of, is some computing algorithms
are 25x faster when run on the GPU.

But you should also be aware, that not many things see that
level of acceleration. Very few computing problems are
amenable to "infinite divide and conquer". So, smaller
levels of acceleration are to be expected.

And there aren't that many programs which use this feature yet.
There are programming kits, allowing scientists and programmers
to experiment with the capabilities. But it has not reached the
stage, where your copy of Microsoft Word will run 25X faster.
Maybe the latest Photoshop or Premiere might use it. Or
perhaps the latest beta of some open source video compressor.
It's very much a "bleeding edge" technology at the moment.
Not enough people know how to use it.

*******

The thing you see in Windows 7 ("Aero"), involves compositing.
You don't need much of a video card to support that. Apple
was doing that before Microsoft decided to do it, and their
video cards were pretty weak for that purpose.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

Pretty much all the OSes have something like that available now.
(Linux has Compiz.)

*******

The video card can speed up other things. The video card
has a playback accelerator for certain movie standards.

Some terms for this: AVIVO, PureVideo, DXVA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DXVA

This allows a computer with a slightly weaker CPU, to be
able to play HD movies.

*******

The video card speeds up 3D games. You knew that already.
That is Direct3D or OpenGL.

For 2D, the video card supports things like BitBlt ("Bit Blit"),
which is as old as the hills. They don't even benchmark 2D
performance of video cards any more, so this hardly gets
any mention.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitblt

HTH,
Paul

 

[a]

I am building one, and recently I see there are NVdia cards
that allow the CPU to use the video card to take over some
of its load. What are the keywords required to ask about
this facility when I buy components?

P

It sounds like you're referring to Nvidia CUDA technology. Since this
is a combination of having the proper video card along with specific
programs that support it, you'll need to know if you have any programs
using CUDA before considering spending the extra money for a CUDA
enabled video card.

"CUDA technology unlocks the power of the GPU’s processor cores to
accelerate the most demanding tasks such as video transcoding, physics
simulation, ray tracing, and more, delivering incredible performance
improvements over traditional CPUs."

"CUDA is NVIDIA’s parallel computing architecture that enables
dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of
the GPU (graphics processing unit)."

"With millions of CUDA-enabled GPUs sold to date, software developers,
scientists and researchers are finding broad-ranging uses for CUDA,
including image and video processing, computational biology and
chemistry, fluid dynamics simulation, CT image reconstruction, seismic
analysis, ray tracing, and much more."

http://www.nvidia.com/object/what_is_cuda_new.html

 

[Gary]

I am building one, and recently I see there are NVdia cards that allow
the CPU to use the video card to take over some of its load. What are
the keywords required to ask about this facility when I buy components?

P

"More money"

 

[Fred Manitoba]

HP, INTEL, HP, nVIDIA, HP, INTEL, nVIDIA
These are BESt

 

[Peter Jason]

I am building one, and recently I see there are NVdia cards
that allow the CPU to use the video card to take over some
of its load. What are the keywords required to ask about
this facility when I buy components?

P

Thank you for all replies.

I think I will go for the Intel Motherboard
GIGABYTE_P55A-UD7 because it has many spare slots.

P