Any specific GPU that takes more load off CPU?

[HeWentToJareds]

I was wondering if there are video cards that specialize in taking more load off the cpu than others. I have heard nvidia cards are better at this than ati. Any opinions?

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

If you think about it, graphics cards specialize and do all the graphics work, while the CPU will do everything else. It would be extremely inefficient for the CPU to try and process the GPU's load, and incredibly difficult to make it work vice versa.

There are physX cards, which really don't help a whole lot, are rare to find now, and were expensive.
NVidia cards also support using a GPU as a physX card.
Not very useful IMO,

 

[Technochicken]

The ability for GPU's to take load off you CPU is entirely software dependent. For example, Adobe Photoshop has GPU acceleration for rendering the picture in real time as you edit it, and some video playing softwares have GPU decoding. Browsers are also moving towards GPU rendering for some elements of the web page. Also windows aero draws the windows GUI with the GPU. If you do not use any software that will heavily utilize your GPU, you should not worry about trying to take load off your CPU with a GPU. If you are thinking abut upgrading, why not invest in a better CPU, rather than a better GPU?

 

[mopar man]

If you look at charts and graphs, you'll see that nVidia's 4xx series performs a LOT better than ATI's top cards due to having the PhysX capability. It removes a ton of strain from the CPU when you are running software with PhysX capabilities.

I found this to be certain when my 5750 and Phenom II X3 dive bombed when running Mafia 2 with APEX enabled :O