MythBusters: CPU vs GPU.. or Paintball Cannons are Cool!!!

"The duo behind the popular Mythbusters showed the results of six months of work, demonstrating the difference between a CPU and a GPU, following the conventional wisdom of parallel computing." says the person from TGdaily.

I say I want one bad. I need to paint my house and it looks like it could be done in under 5 mins with this. Also, watch the last seconds of the film they show it in slow mo.. very cool

http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39112/135/
spoco2says...

A video that was actually MADE by the slow motion replay!

Awesome.

and
"Cool project, but seems like propaganda to me. Why is that a GPU vs. a CPU?"

What it's showing is the difference between serial and parallel computing. Currently the most we have in consumer CPUs (the Central Processing Unit inside your computer), is 4 cores working together. The video card in my pc here...(8800 GTS) has 96 processors, and the latest GTX 280 has, you guessed it, 280 processors... that's SERIOUS parallel processing.

So, this demo is Bang on the money.

And brilliant!

Aemaethsays...

>> ^xgabex:
>> ^budzos:
Please be serious. It'd be awesome if you were that dumb.

Seems needlessly vicious. Not everyone is a computer wiz.


That's the thing: I actually am a computer whiz.

Anyway, I understand all that, but nothing here explains that. All it says, as I explained to budzos, is CPU vs. GPU, not that rendering is involved or anything else. This creates the message that GPU's are just plain faster and not just at rendering graphics. Also note that this is from NVision.

CPU's with 8 cores are now hitting the market. The reason for this is because they have been hitting the peak of current architecture on single-core chips and still wanted to expand. The reason GPU's have been doing this for a while and not CPU's is because GPU's have a different functions than CPU's do. GPU's tend to do fairly simple floating-point equations (but a LOT of them), that's why you can fit 280 parallel stream onto a card like that. On the other hand, any other type of work is better calculated by the CPU. I understand all this, I understand what kind of point they were trying to make, but everyone who would grasp that from this video already KNOWS that. Anyone who didn't would just see "wow, video cards are WAY faster than processors. If my PC games are running slow, I just need a faster video card."

Bottom line: I get the idea, I just think it's badly presented, but still kinda cool to see that paintball gun.

jimnmssays...

>> ^spoco2:
The video card in my pc here...(8800 GTS) has 96 processors, and the latest GTX 280 has, you guessed it, 280 processors.


Actually the GTX 280 has 240 processing cores, the GTX 260 which I just bought has 192.


>> ^Aemaeth:
I understand all this, I understand what kind of point they were trying to make, but everyone who would grasp that from this video already KNOWS that. Anyone who didn't would just see "wow, video cards are WAY faster than processors. If my PC games are running slow, I just need a faster video card."


If your games are running slow, a lot of the time upgrading the video card will help. Take my system, it's almost 3 years old, a 2.2GHz AMD 64 X2 with a Geforce 7800GT. It could barely play BioShock on the lowest settings. After the GPU upgrade I can now play BioShock with all settings maxed and get higher FPS than the old GPU on the lowest settings.

Aemaethsays...

>> ^jimnms:
If your games are running slow, a lot of the time upgrading the video card will help. Take my system, it's almost 3 years old, a 2.2GHz AMD 64 X2 with a Geforce 7800GT. It could barely play BioShock on the lowest settings. After the GPU upgrade I can now play BioShock with all settings maxed and get higher FPS than the old GPU on the lowest settings.


That's true, it often will help, but not always. My brother upgraded his video card recently only to find that his CPU was creating the bottleneck for him and not his GPU. That's the myth that I worry this video spreads.

Quboidsays...

It's a good video, but it is misleading. This was at an nVidia sponsored event, correct? Generally upgrading your GPU is a good help if you're a gamer (and if you're watching this you probably are) but this does sort of suggest that GPUs are just far faster than CPUs and it's not black and white. Technically it's right in that GPUs will do this quicker, but only because these tasks are very simple and there's a large number of them. If you were trying to model a physics theory then a CPU will generally be better at taking that one single task, chewing on it and spitting out one single result as the 196 processors on my new nVidia GTX 260 would spend all their time waiting for some other processor to finish a calculation which it needs the result for. Graphics is different, I game with about 2 million pixels needing processed at least 40 times a second so each processor can largely work on it's own batch of pixels.

The right coder with the right compiler can use GPUs for some funky stuff and CPUs will continue to increase the number of cores on each chip too. I've heard of some research places using game consoles as both their CPU and their GPU are dirty cheap (as MS or Sony is footing the bill, expecting to make it up from commission on game sales).

Anyway the "cpu" had a speed control on it. For all we know they only ever put it up to 3. Crank it to 11 baby!

10874says...

Excellent video!

In the last year, I upgraded from an Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz single core) to a Core 2 Duo E6750 (2.66 GHz dual core, 1333 FSB). I was getting bad performance in my games and needed an upgrade. My video card was a Radeon X1600 Pro PCI-E 512 MB (DDR2 400).

I then bought a new tower and transferred the hardware over. What happened was very interesting.

In Frontlines: Fuel of War (Unreal 3 engine), I had been running in minimal detail on my Athlon. With the Core 2, the game detected my processor and decided that it would raise certain detail levels unadjustable through the ingame menu, resulting in crappier performance than I had been getting. I had to go into the config files and manually adjust several settings to get a playable framerate.

This means that GPUs are much more important to gaming than people think. My video card had set a ceiling limit on my system's gaming performance, even though I now run Crysis in high detail w/ silky smooth framerates with a 9800 GT.

Basically, you are better off with a not so great CPU and a decent video card than the other way around.

If at the time I had to choose between a new CPU or a new video card, I'd have been better off with the GPU.

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