in order for your computer to figure out which of your monitors pixels should be what color at what time on your screen within a matter of milliseconds it has to do a ton of calculations very very quickly in modern computers this is accomplished by the graphics card a term many are familiar with but might not understand all that well now a graphics card is like a smaller version of your entire computer but one dedicated to the task of figuring out how to put images on your screen particularly images that represent a three-dimensional world like your computer the graphics card has its own processor inside of it known as the GPU or graphics processing unit the GPU is to your graphics card what the CPU is to your computer as a whole the primary difference between a GPU and a CPU is in how many cores they have the cores of a processor are like small calculators that can very quickly do the calculations required for your computer to think a modern CPU usually has about eight cores at least while a modern graphics card has anywhere between 1,000m and 4,000 of them although a CPU has less cores each core in the CPU is far
more powerful than each one in the graphics card this is because CPUs are used for things like logic and instructions which can get very complicated even though these cores are more powerful they can each only do one task at a time now when you're talking about instructions that's okay but the individual tasks that are required for graphics rendering aren't really all that complicated there's just a lot of them so using a CPU to render graphics would result in all of the potential of those cores being wasted we end up with all the tasks waiting in line and being rendered slowly not ideal for graphics now the cores in a graphics processing unit being simple but very numerous are perfect for this task so in summary a CPU can do eight really complicated things at once while a GPU can do thousands of very simple things at once think of one person with two big strong arms and another person with ten very weak arms if you needed two big heavy things lifted the guy with two arms is best for that task but if you need ten lightweight things lifted someone with ten weak arms is better the ability to do a bunch of calculations quickly is particularly important for the rendering of three-dimensional worlds when computers create 3d worlds they use something called vector graphics this means they plot out the coordinates on a three-dimensional graph and then draw lines in between them based off mathematical calculations similar to what you likely did in geometry class every object in shape really just comes down to that where are these points in relation to each other and what is the curvature of the line between them that all just comes down to math doing a whole bunch of calculations really quickly this is also why graphics cards are so useful in the process of acquiring cryptocurrency the type of calculations needed to participate in what's known as Bitcoin mining are far more suited to a bunch of small cores than a few very powerful ones now because your graphics card is like its own computer it not only has its own CPU but it also has its own RAM this is often referred to as video RAM or vram and like with your computer's primary ram the ram and your graphics card stores small amounts of very easily accessible data in the image creation process some types of data are very important and need to be used regularly so the RAM in your graphics card stores that data and sends it to the GPU as needed so those are the basics of why and how a graphics card does what it does if you want to know more about the topic of graphics cards liking
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| graphics card work in GPUs |
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