Tablets What would you like to see in the next wave of Surfaces

[Michael Goff]

It would for strict GPGPU applications, but I'd like the graphic capabilities to be improved in general. That would involve sticking more GPU cores on the die or upping the frequency, both of which would drain more power.

I was under the impression that most apps "took advantage of the GPU" these days. Even the browser will tap your GPU when it can to make everything faster.

 

[Liquorpuki]

I was under the impression that most apps "took advantage of the GPU" these days. Even the browser will tap your GPU when it can to make everything faster.

GPGPU works best when you're doing something that requires a lot of parallelism. The graphics pipeline is made to do stuff like create a million polygons at once using the same process. With GPGPU instead of creating a million polygons, you can run the same piece of code a million times. So if you have a CPU operation that's highly iterative, or you have to use the same algorithm on a million different objects, the GPU will be more efficient than the CPU.

Either way, if your goal is to get the best graphics output possible from your HD4400 GPU, using the GPU's pipeline and memory for offloading compute instead of creating graphics will just make things worse.

 

[Michael Goff]

GPGPU works best when you're doing something that requires a lot of parallelism. The graphics pipeline is made to do stuff like create a million polygons at once using the same process. With GPGPU instead of creating a million polygons, you can run the same piece of code a million times. So if you have a CPU operation that's highly iterative, or you have to use the same algorithm on a million different objects, the GPU will be more efficient than the CPU.

Either way, if your goal is to get the best graphics output possible from your HD4400 GPU, using the GPU's pipeline and memory for offloading compute instead of creating graphics will just make things worse.

Stuff like this is why I come here.

Thanks for helping explain it to me.