What can graphics cards do besides colouring and shading?

[TheBigCheese]

I'm currently in the market for a new graphics card (I have a thread on it), and am trying to convince myself of reasons why I should buy bigger and better than what I probably should.

That made me wonder, what can graphics cards or more specifically their GPUs do to make buying a faster card a good prospect?

I hope this thread will be useful for everyone and as people come up with ideas (useful ones please, not using the box as a doorstop or cat den) I'll update the OP.


1. Video encoding
Nvidia cards can use Badaboom software to use the power of the GPU to significantly increase the speed of recoding video from one format to another, it's especially useful for recording HD footage to smaller files for Youtube etc.
I'm not sure what the quality of the encoder is like though...does anyone use it?

2. Folding at home
I believe GPUs can now be taken advantage of for complex calculations for medical (or alien!) research.

3...
I'm a bit stuck...can anyone tell me what else they can be used for? I did think of Adobe product acceleration but I think that's the Quadro cards only.

 

[d_brennen]

Heat your feet in the winter?

 

[MichaelM]

AMD does the video encoding aswell but i've never used it so can't say how effective either of them would be.

Nvidia uses CUDA for the folding at home stuff so just search for CUDA compatible programs to see what else can be done there.

 

[lay-z-boy]

1. Media encoding, I use mediacoder as it's free.

2. folding/other dc

3. acceleration in adobe products i.e flash/cs5

4. higher in-game settings/levels of aa

5. space heater

6. realtime simulation

7. medical imaging

8. physics simulation (i.e physx)

9. accelerated encryption/decryption

10. environmental statistics/prediction

Off the top of my head that's what I can think of.

 

[biuro74]

If you didn't convince yourself yet, so probably there's no need to buy bigger card

 

[straxusii]

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