GPU to speed up applications
I’ve heard about this in the past and I’m still on the fence with it. On the one hand I can see the benefit of having a Graphics Processor doing some computational work, say for example turning a powerful desktop into a supercomputer fairly cheaply. I can also see a downside too.
One example being that Microsoft and going to be using it in the upcoming Vista release to speed up the desktop Aero.
So you’re telling me that unless I have a high powered GPU then my experience of Vista will be less then impressive? Sounds like another way to get people to buy new hardware to me.
In the past, people who bought new GFX cards were gamers or people who were actually going to use the power of a good GFX card. People who wanted to use a PC for word-processing, accounts or other office type duties didn’t require one that was great, just a card that was VGA compatible.
Then what happened was it got harder to find PCI GFX cards, so if you’re onboard GFX died or your GFX card at the time died, it wasn’t economically feasible to get a PCI card, so you ended up upgrading your whole system as your motherboard didn’t support AGP or something.
So, you’d have a new motherboard, which wouldn’t fit your old CPU or RAM, so these would need to be upgraded. And on and on. Eventually, you had your system back as you like it, and you are working away. Then you find that the application you use for word-processing has a bug or say the original media is damaged, or the hardware in your new machine isn’t supported in your old OS, so you need to upgrade that. Then you find the old software won’t run in the new OS so you have to upgrade that. Then once that’s done, you’re fine, until you try to load your old saved account files and find that these are incompatible, so you have to do the work all over again if there isn’t a convertor available.
Now we find that if you want to get Vista, you may need to upgrade your GFX card just to make it run as it should. Another area of the PC that is now on the frequent upgrade path, even if you don’t use games or video editing or anything else that doesn’t require a good GFX, the simple updated features in Vista will help with that one.
How many hands are Microsoft shaking in the business world now?
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