It turns out there are ways of doing things with computer hardware that’s faster.Muchfaster.
What Is Hardware Acceleration?
A good example of this is a GPU.
Elizabeth Henges / How-To Geek
Other examples of hardware acceleration in typical computers and mobile devices are video encoding and decoding.
Large processors like CPUs and GPUs have dedicated sections within their own structures that are geared towards special jobs.
Why Is Hardware Acceleration Faster?
Hardware acceleration is all about specialization.
Your CPU is a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
What Are the Downsides of Hardware Acceleration?
Hardware acceleration comes with a few trade-offs.
The biggest one is loss of flexibility.
Another significant downside of hardware acceleration is that you’re locked into a particular process.
You’ll need a new phone for that!
Similarly, the gameAlan Wake 2makes use of a graphical hardware component known asmesh shaders.
For example, that ray-tracing acceleration hardware in NVIDIA RTC graphics cards could have been general-purpose GPU processors.
This means you’re giving up non-ray tracing performance in favor of that feature running much faster.
In most cases the effect on performance versus using general-purpose processing is profound.
