Hi,
I was thinking about graphics processors the other day, and wondered something. Most of the time, our fancy 3D accellerated cards arn't doing much, they're ususally only under heavy load when we're playing games. So I was wondering if it was possible to say, shell out a portion of the main processor's day to day tasks to the graphics processor to perform, thus, taking the load off the main processor and speeding up system performance as a whole? For example, say I was doing something that wasn't graphics intensive, but had alot of IO interaction, as well as numbercrunching... say compiling an application. Is there a way I could utalize my graphic card's processor to take over the IO tasks, and let the main CPU just do the heavy number crunching, and wouldn't this speed things up, almost like a multiple processor machine? Even opening up the idea of adding multiple graphics cards to a machine (and maybe using them to just display a normal desktop on multiple monitors so they wouldn't go to waste in the meantime) and using their processors as well, all at the same time? I don't know alot about how graphics processors work and what types of functions they're optimized to perform, but I think it could be possible and probably benefitial if it could/has been done. Does anybody know of a way this could be done, say by a kernel module, or even just a normal program that would act as an interface for other programs to utalize the graphic cards potential, or would it take totally rewriting the kerenl or something drastic like that? I've heard of a program that is a sort of SETI@HOME style thing that only uses the graphics card when you're only doing desktop things (eg, you turn it off when you wanna play a game, or it flips off automatically) and they could just leave it there crunching numbers all day while the CPU sat at near idle, but I don't recall what it was (so if anybody knows what I'm talking about, could you point me in the right direction, although this is not exactly what I want to do, it's on the same subject).

Marshall

Paragraphing is a great skill, try it.

Probably not very feasible. Your average GPU is designed around pixel pipelines and was built specifically for rendering graphics. That is why my 625MHz Geforce can render graphics about a hundred thousand times faster than my two 2200MHz Athlon cores.