GPUs

GPUs, or graphics processing units, are specialized processors designed to accelerate the rendering of images, video, and increasingly a wide range of parallelizable compute workloads. While CPUs focus on general-purpose instruction throughput, GPUs house hundreds or thousands of smaller cores that execute many threads in parallel, making them well suited for vector and matrix operations used in graphics pipelines and scientific computing.

Architecture and memory

GPUs organize work into many small processing units grouped into streaming multiprocessors. They rely on high-bandwidth memory, such as GDDR6/6X or HBM, and feature wide memory interfaces to sustain data throughput. Modern GPUs also incorporate caches and dedicated units for texture sampling, rasterization, and shading. Their parallel architecture enables efficient execution of highly data-parallel tasks but requires careful programming to optimize memory access patterns and thread occupancy.

Programming and APIs

Real-time graphics are typically programmed via APIs like DirectX, OpenGL, or Vulkan. Compute-focused work relies on frameworks such as CUDA (NVIDIA) and OpenCL, along with vendor-specific libraries and toolchains. Shading languages such as HLSL and GLSL are used for writing GPU programs, while Vulkan supports both graphics and compute workloads.

Applications and features

GPUs drive gaming and professional visualization, as well as general-purpose GPU computing (GPGPU) for machine learning, simulations, and data processing. Modern GPUs often include specialized hardware for ray tracing and AI workloads, such as RT cores and tensor cores, which accelerate realistic rendering and neural network inference. Memory bandwidth and latency are critical performance factors.

Market and variants

There are consumer GPUs for gaming and content creation and professional/workstation GPUs optimized for stability and large memory capacities. Major vendors include NVIDIA and AMD, offering product lines such as GeForce/RTX and Radeon RX for consumers, and RTX/Quadro or Radeon Pro for professional use.