Can my CPU help my GPU?

[Narnia]

I have a laptop computer with a really nice 8 core processor. I have a game that I like to run that can't use all 8 cores. It also doesn't use very much of my ram (the Task Manager said that I was using 50% of my RAM normally (that's windows 7 for u ) and 60-70% when running the game. The weakest part of my computer is its graphics card. Is there a way with an i7 to use have the cpu or use the RAM to boost proformance of the graphics card (it's an nvidia, I forgot the model number)? Thanks

 

[GoodGame]

Probably you should ask at Intel, since that sounds like kind of a bizarre request, or something hack would be needed for. Usually it is the accessory cards that alleviate computing burden on the CPU, not the other way around.

But I have found this thread: http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=191378
Sounds like "NO".

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Not even close to possible. You can't just offload random GPU instructions to the CPU without designing the software for it.

 

[Speedo]

It's totally possible, just completely impractical. Even if you got it to work, performance improvement would probably be fairly small. There's a reason that dedicated GPUs came about in the first place.

 

[Strider]

Not even close to possible. You can't just offload random GPU instructions to the CPU without designing the software for it.

It's totally possible, just completely impractical. Even if you got it to work, performance improvement would probably be fairly small. There's a reason that dedicated GPUs came about in the first place.

This and this. It's possible, but most likely out of pretty much anyone's reach. GPU/CPU's are very similiar, but are designed for different tasks. GPU's often have many more 'stream processors' (the card in my computer has 128) than a CPU will. This is because when your dealing with graphics processing the speed isn't as important as simultaneous processing is. Put stupidly simple: You want a GPU to do as much as possible at one time rather than one thing very quickly (or 8 things with a 8-core).

 

[ParadigmShifter]

Basically, no.

GPU is optimised for parallel processing. You have to upload data to the GPU before it can be used so having available CPU RAM doesn't help.

The only thing the CPU does graphics wise these days is provide a list of vertices to transform and light, and a list of textures to apply, as well as which fragments (vertex/pixel shaders etc.) to use. Then it is hands off from then on.

Most games aren't very CPU intensive anyway, unless they have massive amounts of AI to process or do a lot of physics calculations. Some physics stuff can be done to the GPU as well, but this isn't common.

EDIT: The main task for the CPU graphicswise is deciding which primitives don't need to be processed (geometry culling and such). The more stuff you can avoid processing on the GPU the better.