What Is a Graphics Processing Unit?

Video Transcript

"This is a graphics card and this is a graphics processing unit underneath the heat sink or GPU. And generally on all graphics cards you will notice that the heat sink is going to be larger and larger with the more expensive ones, because they put out more heat. A GPU is just essentially the brain of a graphics card. Now a graphics card is a small computer dedicated only to processing 3-D graphics. So the more GPU power that you have, the more graphics processing power your computer has overall. In even on some of the newer graphics cards you can take two different graphics cards together and make them operate as one. So you have two GPUs working on the same computer, which makes it for a great gaming PC or video editing PC. So the GPU is measured in megahertz, and quite possibly gigahertz very soon. And the higher the gigahertz and megahertz the greater processing power that the graphics card has. Also, it has a front side bus, which is how fast that processed information gets to the rest of the graphics card, and to the computer. And then it also has cores. Cores are how many different segments are on one particular graphics processing unit. So the highest number that they have are quan-cores, which are four different segmentations of one processor. And those different segmentations can do different processing at the same time. So the more segmentation you have, generally the better processing power that GPU has."