this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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Technology

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What interesting can I do with a dedicated GPU? (piefed.jeena.net)
submitted 13 hours ago by jeena@piefed.jeena.net to c/technology@beehaw.org
16 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

For the first time in my life I own a PC with a reasonable powerful dedicated graphics card. It's the Nvidia RTX 3060 with 12GB VRAM. I know it's older and so on but before that I only had laptops and integrated GPUs which were not very powerful.

I bought it specifically to edit videos and it works very well for it. But I edit videos perhaps once a month and the rest of the time the GPU is practically idling.

What I found is that I can run up to 14b big LLMs on it, so I set it up and am using it for that too, and it's really a lot of fun which I didn't quite expect.

And therefore I'm wondering what other fun things I could do with this graphics card, any tips?

Gaming is not very entertaining to me, I do it even more seldom than video editing, so I'm looking for other things.

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[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 6 hours ago

Have a bunch of fun with Stable Diffusion and whatever models you feel like downloading on CivitAI.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 19 points 13 hours ago

I mean their main use case is gaming... And you can do a few more AI things, LLMs aside. For example generate pictures, voice cloning (or changing), you can have a vtuber avatar and do live-streams as an anime girl. Or run Jupyter Notebooks with arbitrary machine learning projects. Do virtual reality. Or run a big CAD program and design some objects. Maybe even run finite element method simulations to see how your workpiece will deform with stress...

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Adjacent to video editing, do you have any interest in visual effects? Lots of really sophisticated CGI and other VFX in film can be done from consumer-grade GPUs like yours.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 4 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Hm didn't think of that but I guess it could be build in to my videos to make them more entertaining to watch

[–] wagesj45@fedia.io 2 points 7 hours ago

Blender. So good.

[–] badcodecat@lemux.minnix.dev 12 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

download blender, turn on optix, and enter the rabbit hole ;)

[–] Anissem@lemmy.ml 5 points 12 hours ago

I’ve finally made the donut

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 3 points 11 hours ago

Blender sounds very cool but also very intimidating ^^

[–] helix@feddit.org 8 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Folding@home

[–] Albbi@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 hours ago

There's also GIMPS for searching for the largest prime number.

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

You can play most vidja james with the graphics maxed out. At least @ 1080p on that one.

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 4 points 12 hours ago

You can run an artificial life simulator. There basically a digital aquarium.

This one (Project Alien) is beautiful and is made using nvidias cuda technology. You cant run it on amd. (Though i am certain amd has alternatives)

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 5 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Go download ComfyUI (civitai is a good source of models) and Blender. A snappy cycles viewport is something to behold. Do simulation nodes run on GPU? If they do you can do all kinds of stuff with that.

Oh, last but not least: You can swap to VRAM.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 11 hours ago

Hm, never heard of ComfyUI, will check it out!

[–] datavoid@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Use BOINC to share the love

[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 2 points 4 hours ago

With the obvious disclaimer that it will hike your electricity bill.