Why do games require more GPU than videos?

I was wondering why video games require such a powerful GPU but regular movies and stuff can be run on almost any GPU...It's probably a simple explanation that I'm just completely missing, but could somebody please explain it to me? Thanks!

 

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of triangles/polygons and pixels. Then you have particle effects and other nice pixel tricks... You need absurd amounts of power to render all of that on your screen.

Wait did you want a simple explanation or a complex one?

 

Basically, the images in videos are prerendered (they're already drawn and just needs to be shown in quick succession) while in games each image has to be actively drawn and then shown.

What takes more effort, showing someone a completed flip book animation or having to draw each individual image from scratch?

 

Bang on. When they render a scene for a movie like Toy Story, it takes a room full of servers and sometimes days.

Rendering is basically recording it to video. Before the render, like a game, you can change your point of view and move around the scene; afterwards you can't, like a movie.

 

In a game, your graphics card has to process 3-dimensional objects and environments in real time. With a video, essentially all your GPU has to do is show a series of images that have already been made.

Imagine drawing a cartoon from scratch. One second's worth of footage, 24 frames. You'd have to go through all the work of drawing an entire frame, 24 times. But to actually view the cartoon, all you have to do is flip those 24 pages quickly over the course of one second.

 

Thanks guys! Rep added (to three of you at least, it won't let me do anymore today...I'll do it tomorrow though)

 

"already calculated" as opposed to "real time calculation", movie is data, game is an algorithm running

 

Just consider video as looking at photos in rapid succession. With games it's actually drawing those photos dozens of times a second. Doesn't take much to flip through photos, but if you had to draw every photo it would take a heck of a lot of time or a heck of a lot of resources to do it quickly.

 

GPU chips have many functions embedded, of which the main function is to render graphics. There is often a dedicated portion of the GPU die for video playback. Video playback uses the VPU for NVIDIA GPUs and UVD for AMD GPU for example. Very often, the video portion of the GPU die is the same for both low and high end GPUs.

Rendering graphics though will be more complex though and requires much more resources with all the polygon to be drawn and effects to be calculated (sometimes through physics too.)

 

when You play game the gpu make movie
when You watch movie the gpu play already made movie

please correct me if Im wrong