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I want my GPU to be able to do some of my processor's work when I'm playing games or doing tasks like that.

My processor is an AMD FX-4200 running at 4.1 GHz and my GPU is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

Obviously, I have a very powerful GPU, and when I'm running less graphic-demanding games such as Star Wars Battlefront, I want to be able to have my GPU (assuming it has free processing space) do some of the processor's work. Is this possible? If so, how could I do it?

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  • What you want is not possible. Your GPU is already being used to run the program though.
    – Ramhound
    Jun 20, 2017 at 20:11
  • @Ramhound OK thanks why don't you put that as an answer so I can accept it.
    – rappatic
    Jun 20, 2017 at 20:13
  • If the program was written in OpenCL it could run on the GPU, or at least be assisted by the GPU. The number of programs that have and/or use OpenCL(nvidia aka cuda) is tiny number.
    – cybernard
    Jun 20, 2017 at 23:44

2 Answers 2

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CPU and GPU can't be used interchangeably. They are specifically designed to be good at some kinds of computations and bad at others. (because building one single processing unit that's good at everything is not possible)

Think about it: if CPU and GPU could do the same work, why would GPUs even exist? Why not perform all computations on CPU?

GPUs are a thing because CPUs are bad at processing graphics. Originally they weren't capable of performing general purpose computations at all, it's a relatively new idea.

So to recap, in general you can't offload some work from CPU to GPU or the other way. A program must be specifically designed to be able to do this. Basically, the algorithm must be implemented separately for CPU and GPU, because they work in totally different manner (CPUs are SISD, GPUs are SIMD).

Some programs can do that, notably some video processing software. There are also games which will let you choose whether physics are calculated by CPU or using PhysX hardware on the graphics card. Unless explicitly permitted by the software, it's not possible to select which unit will perform computations.

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How much of your GPU and CPU that are being used is up to the developer of the game/program. They can code for heavy CPU usage or more on the GPU side. There is not a way to have your your GPU perform non Graphics related task or to assign more workload to the GPU on the user end of things.

You can however overclock your GPU and provide better processing power and speed for what the CPU is working on.

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