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throwaway894345last Saturday at 5:17 AM5 repliesview on HN

That’s interesting, particularly since as far as I can tell, nothing in userland really bothers to make use of its GPU. I would really like to understand why, since I have a whole bunch of Pi’s and it seems like their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI).


Replies

codeflolast Saturday at 9:05 AM

> their GPUs can’t be used for much of anything (not really much for transcoding nor for AI)

It's both funny and sad to me that we're at the point where someone would (perhaps even reasonably) describe using the GPU only for the "G" in its name as not "much of anything".

kcblast Saturday at 6:02 AM

The Raspberry Pi GPU has one of the better open source GPU drivers as far as SBCs go. It's limited in performance but its definitely being used for rendering.

ryandrakelast Saturday at 4:34 PM

One (obscure) example I know of is the RTLSDR-Airband[1] project uses the GPU to do FFT computation on older, less powerful Pis, through the GPU_FFT library[2].

1: https://github.com/rtl-airband/RTLSDR-Airband

2: http://www.aholme.co.uk/GPU_FFT/Main.htm

regularfrylast Saturday at 11:49 AM

There is a Vulkan API, they can run some compute. At least the 4 and 5 can: https://github.com/jdonald/vulkan-compute-rpi . No idea if it's worth the bus latency though. I'd love to know the answer to that.

I'd also love to see the same done on the Zero 2, where the CPU is far less beefy and the trade-off might go a different way. It's an older generation of GPU though so the same code won't work.

bitwizelast Saturday at 8:08 AM

You can play Quake on 'em.