5mo ago

What interesting can I do with a dedicated GPU?

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.

25 comments

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...

download blender, turn on optix, and enter the rabbit hole ;)
- I’ve finally made the donut
- Blender sounds very cool but also very intimidating ^^
  
  I bought a course from udemy to learn it, helps cause you can follow along in an organized order. I actually haven't touched it much since but it was fun to go through. Just make sure to buy their courses on sale if you do, otherwise they can get pretty pricey.

Folding@home
- There's also GIMPS for searching for the largest prime number.

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

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)

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

Ooh, I have a really good answer! Go check out the shadertoy website and see all sorts of OpenGL wizardry running smoothly on your GPU! Shadertoy.com

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

Use BOINC to share the love
- With the obvious disclaimer that it will hike your electricity bill.

Have a bunch of fun with Stable Diffusion and whatever models you feel like downloading on CivitAI.
- Oh, wow, I didn't realize that would be so much fun! And it's somehow faster than the ones online too, and you can really do a lot with all the different models you can download!
  
  Those front hooves scare me
  
  It's been a while since I played with it, but the Dynamic Prompts extension has some options for creating random prompts and combinations. It's neat to have it run through a hundred images to see what it creates, find the interesting ones, and then focus on that prompt for some more refined images. Or upscale and inpaint/outpaint the ones you want.

25 comments