How does GPU acceleration work?

[Deemo13]

Hey Tom's,

I'm taking a CS class in college currently, and the school offered me Visual Studio 2010 to have, because that is what we use in class. Apparently, because I was bored and in my math class, I looked up the Nvidia 4xx series of GPU's and realized that my GTX460 would support GPU acceleration in Video Studio.

My question is how does it work? Is it automatic? Do I have to turn it on? What exactly is it speeding up?

This doesnt have to be in terms of Visual Studio. More just in general.

Just trying to learn a few things here.
-Josh

EDIT: I think I was wrong in the GTX460 being eligible for GPU acceleration, but I would still like to know how it works.

EDIT2: Apparently, since the 460 has CUDA, it would work anyway. I'm getting more confused now.

 

[drums101]

Josh,
Are you a CS major? I am a Computer Engineer major and at my college at least they share very similar classes....surprised to see you posting a question on here lol used to you answering them all....from a real general perspective gpu acceleration is basically massive parallel computing...the software makes use of the hundreds of "cores" in a video card to simultaneously compute different things...its similar to having more cores in a cpu...more algorithms can be computed at one time...here is a little article on it and has to do with visual studio

http://www.microsoft.com/hpc/en/us/solutions/gpgpu-acceleration.aspx

and visual studio supports CUDA so I think your 460 should be able to

Joe

 

[dingo07]

Come on guys, you both know the power of the Internet... http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html

 

[drums101]

^ha for some that didnt pop up when I googled for an article...but it basically does a much better job explaining what I did

 

[Deemo13]

I'm a Computer Engineering major as well Joe, but I am going to switch to Mechanical Engineering (I like cars too much). I'm at University of the Pacific.

I'm not going to switch for awhile though, for my CS class is very interesting.

Also, that clears up how it works. I was just wondering really, because it seems as if the program runs faster on my computer in the dorm rather than my computer in the labs here.

I was interested to see how GPU acceleration worked. Thanks!

 

[drums101]

no problem man...how many years do you have down in computer engineering? it gets much better as it goes on lol...you start taking some cool classes later on (around year 3 or so)...yea your computer has a much faster graphics card than the ones in the lab....they prolly dont even have a dedicated card in them so there is no gpu acceleration at all

Edit: University of Pacific is that in Cali? I am at the University of Illinois at Chicago....its the ghetto of the Illinois schools lol

 

[Deemo13]

University of the Pacific is in California yes. And this is my freshman year.

And I figured it was Chicago.....because of your picture.

 

[drums101]

Do you like it out there? good school? UIC is alright not the best professors but I got alot of money from them so I can stick it out....next semester I am taking a class where you wire circuits using a breadboard and then you hook it up to a computer via usb and write programs in assembly that interact with the circuits you build...its gonna be fun

 

[Deemo13]

Yea its a great school! I'm actually taking circuits next semester as well. I'm learning about CS right now and hopefully I get to implement it. The professors are pretty cool.

 

[drums101]

nice man my second semester I took a circuits class that was just breadboard work and it was a blast sitting there for a 3 hour lab wiring up mux's and crap...goodtimes lol

 

[Deemo13]

Good stuff.