There's been a lot of talk this year about the potential of parallel computing in the home. Nvidia, Intel and AMD are all pushing the idea of using the GPU on a graphics card to offload data-intensive tasks from the CPU.

The Nvidia GeForce 9600 GT, for example, features 64 programmable shader cores. For the most part, a card like this is designed for rendering high-level visual effects in video games like Far Cry 2 and Fallout 3. But the GPU's processing cores can also be reallocated for other tasks – i.e. calculating real-time physics (PhysX), decoding H.264 video or enhancing the quality of photos.

It's early days for multi-core processing. The majority of today's applications are built with single-core processors in mind. But the idea of using the processing muscle of a graphics card GPU has definite benefits for digital home applications.

The secret life of graphics cards

GPUs are ideal for math-heavy tasks – scientific systems featuring clusters of GPU chips are already outperforming CPU-only hardware in fields as diverse as molecular dynamics, ray tracing, medical imaging and sequence matching.

On the home front, the latest AMD and Nvidia graphics cards can already offload video decoding to the GPU. It's the sort of repetitive number-crunching that's ideally suited to the GPU's multi-core architecture.

Using CUDA, Nvidia's C-based language, Elemental Technologies has developed the Badaboom Media Encoder. By hijacking the power of a CUDA-compatible GPU (and that's anything since the 8800 GTX), a video that might take three hours to transcode, might take as little as 30 minutes using GPU parallelism. Of course, that's an estimate based on Nvidia's fastest cards. If you factor in the GeForce GTX 280, it features 240 programmable shader cores.

Speeding up your computer

More recently, Adobe's PhotoShop 4 has been optimised to offload certain tasks to a Shader 3.0-compatible GPU. It uses GPU-acceleration to improve zooming, rotation, colour matching and transitions at all display levels. You don't lose any features by not having a compatible GPU. But, as John Nack, Adobe's Senior Vice President, points out: "a good graphics card will now blow away other computers that don't have them."

Cyberlink's PowerDirector 7 software promises "up to five-times faster video previewing and rendering performance" with the help of GPU resources. While the new S3FotoPro imaging application can use the GPU power on S3's Chrome 400/500 chips to adjust a photo's colour clarity, saturation and tonal balance on the fly.

While a GPU can't provide any speed boosts to your web browser or word processor, the average Media Center PC will reap the benefits of this burgeoning technology. In fact, if you own a dual-core PC with an Nvidia 9600 GT inside, you've really got 66 processors rather than two. Next year, your PC should start talking full advantage of them.