what does a graphic card do other than games?

[buzzhead0]

what does a graphic card do other than enhance gaming quality? what else are graphic cards good for ?

 

[vixl2ds]

graphic card or GPU (graphic PROCCESING unit) ... is a proccesor, similar to cpu... the difference is in the way they work... they process information differenly... basicaly a gpu is used in video editing or when a lot of data needs to be processed quicky...

video editting
graphic desings
supercomputers

 

[tachybana]

Watch high quality Blu-Ray (or 3D Material)

 

[vixl2ds]

also graphic cards put your image on the screen.. so if you want to use high definition monitors like ultra HD ... or multiple monitors, you need video cards to be good enough to do it

 

[rothingham]

Well, mostly games.
There are also workstation graphics cards like the AMD FirePro's and NVIDIA Quadro's, but they're expensive as hell.
These aren't good for games, but are used for rendering of 3D models.

 

[DonQuixoteMC]

what does a graphic card do other than enhance gaming quality? what else are graphic cards good for ?

For the average user? Not much. It increases graphics performance everywhere on your computer but that's (practically) it.

However, you can use the power of a GPU for Bitcoin/Litecoin mining and then there's always Nvidia's CUDA technology.

This is definitely not an exhaustive list of things you can use your GPU for, it's a generalization.

 

[RobCrezz]

They can also increase the speed of video encoding/decoding if you are converting videos or simply video editing.

 

[rjvitt]

Graphics cards are very helpful in things other than gaming. They help take load off of your cpu by rendering images and other things in your computer so the cpu no longer has to. While they are essential for game editing, and video or image editing will also be a million times better with a graphics card. Depending on your uses for the computer you may or may not want/need a graphics card. A professional photographer or video editor is going to need a high quality graphics card whereas
the everyday office person who uses Microsoft Office will not see a huge difference in everyday tasks. A really hardcore gamer will go for a 780 TI which will cost $1000 a piece whereas that is twice as much as an everyday persons whole computer. So if you have a special task that you are using your computer for you can tell me and I can recommend a few graphics cards that will help you out.

 

[Amoenus]

DICLAIMER: I know I am bumping an old thread but I wanted to share another use

Additionally GPU can be used for tasks like bitcoin mining (no longer the most efficient way) and other computational and data mining tasks that may benefit from GPU architecture. The one I personally used for my bachelor thesis on Artificial Neural Networks. The software is called "Multiple Back-Propagation" and "Orange Canvas". Enabling CUDA cores in those applications increased performance dramatically (can't remember exactly but I think it was up to 4 times faster than using just my CPU).