Putting that unused GPU back to work

[calvinAnd]

I just got a new graphics card for my computer, but my motherboard also has an onboard GPU. Once I install my new card the onboard GPU won't be doing anything any more. Is there any way to take advantage of it and put it back to work? The GPU wouldn't even necessarily need to be doing graphics. There are a whole bunch of applications that could take advantage of the high floating point calculation throughput of GPUs.

Anyways, is there currently any way to do this? If not does anyone know if there is a reason why?

[CaptNKILL]

I don't think you can do anything too useful with it really.

As for the why, its mostly because no one is programming anything to make use of them.

They said we'd be using graphics cards for physics but that really never materialized in any significant way.

I think the closest thing to what you're talking about us GPGPU, but i think its uses are generally pretty obscure and meaningless to most users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPGPU

I'll admit, I don't know much about it. But if there were any good uses for secondary graphics chips, I'm sure it would be all over sites like nvnews.

[calvinAnd]

Thanks for the response. This is exactly what I was looking for. Although, it doesn't look like this is a dead idea. Apparently nvidia is investing in gpgpu as are AMD and probably Intel. The problem right now is just that the gpu processors are highly constrained and optimized for graphics, so it's a bit difficult to perform general computation on them.

[curaga]

Well, it's always nice to have more than one monitor :)

[XDanger]

The x-fi chip is lazy also just making noises ,Lets put it to work down the mines or something.

[seeker]

Well, it's always nice to have more than one monitor :)
Depending on the video card, you don't need more than one to have a second monitor.

[curaga]

I didn't say so. But if you have a dual-output one, then three monitors it is :)

[methimpikehoses]

I tried dual monitors once and wasn't impressed. 19" and 24" didn't look very good.

[crainger]

I'm tempted to get my old CRT out for dual monitors. Running Crysis at 1024x768 should be nice and smooth... ::D: