Surrounding the excitement of the RTX 3000 series being unveiled, much was said regarding the improvements NVIDIA made to CUDA Cores.
If you have ever wondered what CUDA Cores are and if they even make a substantial difference to PC gaming, you’re in the right place.
In order to understand what precisely CUDA Cores do, we will need to get a little technical.
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What Are NVIDIA CUDA Cores?
As you might have already guessed, CUDA is an acronym that stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, a parallel computing platform but also an application programming interface (API).
It was engineered by NVIDIA specifically to allow software developers to have enhanced control over the physical resources at their disposal.
A computer programmer coding in C or C++ now has a significant deal of control over resource allocation. The CUDA system has boosted the popularity and usage of frameworks like OpenACC and OpenCL.
It’s interesting to note that, due to the extraordinary versatility of the CUDA API, multiple companies have used it for something other than PC gaming.
In fact, its potential uses are truly remarkable. Some of these include tasks such as computational chemistry, machine learning, data science, bioinformatics, computational fluid dynamics, and weather and climate applications.
CUDA cores are also parallel processors that allow data to be worked on concurrently by different processors. This is akin to a dual-core or a quad-core CPU, except that there are innumerable CUDA cores.
Do NVIDIA CUDA Cores Help PC Gaming?
Of course! The fact that CUDA Cores have a wide array of uses doesn’t mean that they don’t make a difference to PC gaming. In fact, NVIDIA CUDA cores are a significant boost to PC gaming graphics because they are so powerful.
We’re again going to be a bit technical, but ideally, we will be able to clarify how some game graphics work and how precisely CUDA cores help.
In earlier times, a GPU was employed as an extension of the CPU to accelerate image processing. Leaping ahead 20 years, GPUs today handle various effects to provide a more engaging experience.
Unlike ray tracing cores (RT cores), which are dedicated to performing flawless lighting calculations to create lifelike shadows and other lighting effects, CUDA cores are primarily tasked with physical computations.
NVIDIA can also boast about PhysX, a real-time physics engine middleware extensively used by game developers so they wouldn’t have to code their own Newtonian physics. In the past, NVIDIA cards required a particular PhysX chip, but with CUDA Cores, there is no longer this requirement.
The extraordinary power that CUDA Cores possess means game developers are free to place as much strain on the side of physics calculations as they wish. In terms of coding, that isn’t complex, and the developers only need the gamers to possess the advanced GPUs.
The CUDA Cores are extraordinary at handling tasks such as smoke animations and the animation of debris, fire, liquids, and more. These are effectively all of the components needed to make game graphics look as realistic as possible.
They are a substantial boost to PC gaming and have cleared the path for the even more lifelike graphics that we have seen in the past few years.
