◦ Optimized configs
◦ Industry-leading support
GPU → Use Cases
What is a GPU useful for?
It turns out, a GPU’s ability to handle highly parallelized tasks is a game changer for a wide variety of business and technology needs.
What is a GPU?
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a circuit uniquely designed to process and manipulate computer graphics and image data in parallel. The GPU takes these types of intensive tasks off of the central processing unit (CPU), so the CPU has more power to handle other, more standard workloads.
Although initially designed for graphics work, GPUs have proven powerful for a wide variety of other use cases as well. Let’s look at some of the other applications GPUs are useful for.
1. GPUs for gaming and visual effects
GPUs were designed to deliver high-resolution graphics and smooth frame rates, enhancing gameplay for users. Game developers also rely on GPU power to optimize real-time rendering, physics simulations, and multiplayer interactions, ensuring high performance under demanding loads.
Those same capabilities enable real-time rendering of photorealistic animations and complex visual effects in movies and commercials. Artists can iterate quickly, apply intricate shaders, process dynamic simulations, etc., ensuring polished results more efficiently than ever.
2. GPUs for video editing
GPUs handle high-demand video editing workflows by speeding up rendering, encoding, and effects processing. This ensures smooth playback and faster exports, even with high-resolution content like 4K and 8K footage, so editors can work more efficiently.
3. GPUs for AI and machine learning
GPUs can process massive datasets in parallel, which accelerates AI training and inference, reducing the time to train machine learning models. Businesses developing AI solutions gain faster iterations on their algorithms, which means quicker deployment of applications like natural language processing (NLP), computer vision, and recommendation systems.
4. GPUs for big data analytics
GPUs handle complex data sets by performing computations simultaneously across multiple cores. This drastically improves the speed of data visualization, predictive modeling, and real-time analytics, so businesses can extract actionable insights without long processing delays.
5. GPUs for finance
GPUs enhance the performance of financial modeling by running risk simulations, algorithmic trading models, and portfolio optimizations with greater speed and precision. This gives banks, lenders, and investors faster decision-making capabilities, sharper risk assessments, and the ability to backtest strategies at scale.
Ready to get started? Liquid Web’s cloud GPU hosting is designed to meet the growing demand for environments that can handle high-performance computing (HPC) tasks.
6. GPUs for cyber security
GPUs accelerate threat detection and response by rapidly analyzing large volumes of network traffic and logs in real time. Businesses can then implement advanced anomaly detection and encryption techniques to minimize potential security breaches and ensure compliance.
7. GPUs for autonomous vehicle testing
GPUs can simulate and analyze complex driving scenarios in real time, allowing developers to test and refine autonomous vehicle algorithms. This improves the safety and reliability of navigation, perception, and decision-making systems without requiring physical road testing for every iteration.
8. GPUs for medical imaging
GPUs are all about processing large imaging datasets quickly, which can also serve to improve the quality and speed of tasks like MRI reconstruction, CT scans, and diagnostic image analysis. This lets healthcare providers detect abnormalities faster and improve patient outcomes through more accurate imaging.
9. GPUs for mining
GPUs perform the intensive computations needed for solving cryptographic puzzles, maximizing mining efficiency for cryptocurrencies. Their parallel processing capabilities allow for higher hash rates, increasing profitability while minimizing energy usage relative to CPU mining.
10. GPUs blockchain validation
Efficiently cracking those complex cryptographic algorithms also means GPUs are useful for verifying blockchain transactions. This accelerates the validation process for block creation and ensures faster throughput on decentralized networks, particularly for systems demanding high scalability.
11. Virtual reality workloads
GPU server hosting is ideal for VR workloads, because it delivers the high-performance computing needed for real-time rendering, complex physics simulations, and low-latency interactions—all essential for immersive VR experiences.
With access to enterprise-grade GPUs like the NVIDIA L40S or H100, teams can build, test, and deploy VR applications at scale without the limitations of local hardware. Hosted infrastructure also supports remote collaboration, secure access, and faster iteration cycles, making it perfect for both developers and enterprise users running advanced VR simulations or content streaming.
Getting started with a GPU server
Ready to get started? Liquid Web is known for providing high-performance hosting solutions backed by superior customer service. Our new GPU hosting solutions continue this tradition by delivering fast, secure, and scalable services for businesses and use cases that cannot afford downtime or delays.
Additional resources
GPUs vs CPUs →
Learn about how they relate to AI and web hosting
What is a GPU? →
A beginner’s guide to modern GPUs
What Is High Performance Cloud Computing →
Everything you need to know about HPC
