I suggest this video for your side-by-side reading multitasking experience. In the mid 90s I bought a rendition verite GPU and was excited to run vquake. Quake was the first significat attempt at a true 3d first person shooter with client server networking. VQuake was the first GPU accellerated game For the next 10 or 15 years nvideo and ati have remained the two major dedicated graphics processing companies. GPUS offload graphics tasks from the CPU. However these days companies like NVideo and Apple are looking to use the capibilities of GPUS for general purpose computing. Basicly we find ourselves back in the math coprocess days again. I think its just a matter of time before NVidia needs to turn their GPU into a CPU. Originally the GPU made some sense. The bus between the CPU and the graphics output wasn't all that great. It took quite a bit of CPU horsepower to just drive the pixels. Putting 2d and 3d accelleration closer to the output made sense. However for the next 5 years I don't think we are going to see much improvement on resolution. I have a hard time detecting the difference between 720p and 1080p at 60 fps. There isn't much motivation to increase the resolution. While the resolution slows, the bus continues the speed up. Part of the reason for this is so that the CPU can talk to the GPU to off load general purpose computing tasks. However, its always more cost effective to consolidate processors. The real cost of a chip is strongly related to how large it is and how many you make. It seems the motivation will always be to consolidate and make a more general processor. Ideally every machine would have nearly the same specs. Its cost effective and good for the consumer. However I think the industry got greedy. They pumped specs of some items while crippling others. In order to reach 200-400 dollar pc markets they fragmented the equipement. Here is an article that sums all that up.