The Graphics Processing Unit, if available, takes load from the CPU and thus helps make graphics rendering faster.
What is a GPU?
This is an abbreviation for "Graphics Processing Unit", and thus points to a "co-processor" taking load from the CPU. Quoting Wikipedia:
A graphics processing unit (GPU) [...] is a specialized electronic circuit designed to rapidly manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the building of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. Modern GPUs are very efficient at manipulating computer graphics, and their highly parallel structure makes them more effective than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms where processing of large blocks of data is done in parallel.
Related tags
- graphics deals with graphics in general, not necessarily related to the GPU. This tag might be used in conjunction, if it makes sense.
- graphs: Plotting/creating of graphs. Usually unrelated to GPU.
- hardware-acceleration: Of course a good GPU does that...
- processor: usually refers to the CPU. If your issue concerns both, CPU and GPU, you can (and should) of course use both tags.
- tegra: Tegra refers to a chipset including both, CPU and GPU. There are multiple versions of that chipset. Depending on your question, you might use this tag additionally to or instead of the "gpu" tag.
- video: if your issue is video-related, you might already find a solution following this tag. Not everybody is aware of "GPUs" :)
