You may think that a graphics card is better than a processor at generating images because, in fact, what the graphics card does is generate graphics, images on the monitor. However, this is more circumstantial than anything else, because technically the explanation is different, and that’s what we’re going to talk to you about right now.
Graphics vs. processors for generating images
In order to give a technical but understandable explanation of this, we need to “get through the mud” and get back to the basics, but we’ll do it in mundane terms so that everyone can understand it. Everyone knows that a processor has several cores and process threads, and each of them is capable of executing a task in parallel with the others. In the meantime, so much the better. A processor is general-purpose, that is, its instruction set is so broad that it can perform almost any type of task, from simple addition to generating an image.
And while a processor has “a few” general-purpose cores, a graphics card has thousands of cores, but more specific ones, intended to perform only certain specific tasks (including generating images, of course). For example, an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor has 8 cores and 16 threads, which means it can perform 16 simultaneous tasks. For its part, a very old NVIDIA GT730 launched 10 years ago has 96 cores, and is therefore capable of performing 96 tasks in parallel. Now imagine an RTX 4090 with 16,384 cores…
Do you see where we are going? When generating images, a processor would generate pixels bit by bit, while a graphics card would do virtually everything at once.
We can see this wonderfully demonstrated by famous people. Myth busters (Mythbusters in Spanish), which, with the collaboration of NVIDIA, demonstrated precisely that: the generation of images in a processor and a graphics card, painting nothing more and nothing less than the Mona Lisa. If you’re curious, we highly recommend watching the entire video, because it’s pure gold.
In the video we can first see how a processor, in this case with a single core, would generate an image: it does this by throwing paintballs one at a time, and not only does it take a long time but the The result leaves much to be desired. Then they do it by emulating the way a graphics card would, with many cores running in parallel and… well, according to the video, they painted the Mona Lisa in just 80 milliseconds.
This can be extrapolated to reality in a very simple way, as we explained at the beginning: graphics cards have many cores that work in parallel and generate images much faster than a CPU. Logical, right?
