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Graphics processing unit
There are various applications that require a 3D world to be simulated as
realistically as possible on a computer screen. These include 3D
animations in games, movies and other real world simulations. It takes a
lot of computing power to represent a 3D world due to the great amount of
information that must be used to generate a realistic 3D world and the
complex mathematical operations that must be used to project this 3D world
onto a computer screen. In this situation, the processing time and
bandwidth are at a premium due to large amounts of both computation and
data.
The functional purpose of a GPU then, is to provide a
separate dedicated graphics resources, including a graphics processor and
memory, to relieve some of the burden off of the main system resources,
namely the Central Processing Unit, Main Memory, and the System Bus, which
would otherwise get saturated with graphical operations and I/O requests.
The abstract goal of a GPU, however, is to enable a representation of a 3D
world as realistically as possible. So these GPUs are designed to provide
additional computational power that is customized specifically to perform
these 3D tasks
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