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FenderMoon t1_j6lg2w0 wrote

Reply to comment by WeirdGamerAidan in ELI5: Why do computers need GPUs (integrated or external)? What information is the CPU sending to the GPU that it can't just send to a display? by WeirdGamerAidan

Yea, the CPU is basically giving the GPU commands, but the GPU can take those and execute them far faster than the CPU can.

GPUs are very good at things that involve tons of parallel processing calculations. E.g. "Take this texture and apply it over this region, and shade it with this shader." CPUs would sit there and just calculate all of that out one pixel at a time, whereas the GPU has the hardware to look at the entire texture, load it up, and do tons of pixels in parallel.

It's not that the CPU couldn't do these same calculations, but it'd be way slower at it. GPUs are specifically designed to do this sort of thing.

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