Originally posted by: myocardia
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You don't seem to be aware that every video card on Earth, while it's being used to display video, can only output frames as fast as the data is sent to it. Video cards might be used to display things that don't really exist, but they don't just make it up as they go. They display nothing, if nothing is being sent.
Here's
a very good example of exactly what I was describing above happening.
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What's silly is that you keep replying to this thread, trying to argue with me.
Argue with this:
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That quote is referring to current processors, like C2D's, not Pentium-D's. So a GTX280 is at least 10x faster than a C2D, which would make a 9800GT a minimum of 5x faster than a C2D, or ~10x faster than a Pentium-D. BTW, where did I ever say that a video card was a CPU, or vice versa?
For your first statement, yes, I agree completely with it. GPUs do nothing when there is no data. I don't think I ever said anything to the contrary.
As for CUDA, please, do integer addition or any highly procedural process and you will see just how fast a GPU really is (not very at general processing). There are situations where GPUs can go really fast. But there are more where CPUs do better.
And, I believe I stated earlier that there are cases where a GPU can do processing faster then a CPU, Generally that is in highly parallel floating point calculations. GPUs are really good at that, there was never any doubt there.
BTW, where did I ever say that a video card was a CPU, or vice versa?
When you started to compare the speed of a GPU to the speed of a CPU, you where inferring that they are the same. What I'm trying to say, and I'll say it one more time, CPUs and GPUs are different, they do different things faster and slower to each other. So making a comparison like "X GPU is 40920x faster then a CPU" is ridiculous. Yes, there are situations where it is faster (as I listed above, and as you have found) but there are also situations where the CPU is faster then the GPU (Integer addition, Non-parallel tasks, ect) A P4 will cream any GPU on the market in those processes. If that weren't the case, then I would suspect that we would just throw out our CPUs and only use our high powered GPUs. Why have the burden of something that is ultimately just a slowdown?
Do you get what I am trying to say? Yes, both do processing, but they do different types of processing. Heck, even across different architectures comparing two CPUs like you did (X is 29x faster then Y) is crazy talk. Its like sony saying their Cell processor is 8x faster then a C2D. Well, in some situations, yes, it is, but not all.
Saying a GPU is 10x faster then a CPU is an even more absurd comparison. If you add a qualifier. like "This GPU is 10x faster then a C2D in parallel floating point processing" then yes, that makes perfect sense. But making such a broad general statement like "This GPU is 10x faster then a C2D." doesn't make sense.
Is that clear? Im not saying a CPU can't bottleneck a GPU. It can. Im not saying he won't see bigger benefits from getting a new CPU, he will. Im saying that a statement of "This GPU is 10x faster then that CPU" is wrong. Thats it.