Does the video card help to process non-video data (image processing, video, games)?

Question

Iron

I collect a computer. The question is, does the video card help in processing data that is not related to video rendering? The computer will be mainly used for work, there will be a local web server, a git version control system, all kinds of IDE modules indexing tens of thousands of project files every time the IDE is launched (I am a web programmer).
I read somewhere that if the video card is "not busy" with its direct duties, its resources can be used to offload the CPU. In my opinion, the first bitcoin fans described something similar and recommended, in addition to a powerful CPU, to take a good video card.

Answer 1

It may be an alternative for you to use a virtual environment using the capabilities of the GPU. I stumbled upon something like this.
But it won't help you. Let me explain. The total power of even a very weak vidyuhi is tens of times greater than the performance of the processor. The problem is that it is not a "universal processor". Those. it will not be able to process absolutely everything, but only a rather narrow type of tasks. She will either not process all the rest at all (she will not know how), or, if taught, she will do it oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-very slowly. Imagine you are using a Pentium I. Maybe II...
Here, the situation is identical with hardware routers and switches (these are not those that are home D-Links, but corporate-level ones for a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of money), where, despite very powerful processors, they are sharpened only for packet routing and basically they can't do anything else.
So you better look towards multi-core. Or, as an option, even an inexpensive server is well suited for this task. Server processors are very good at dealing with huge indexing and multithreading, which is what they actually need. Build yourself an inexpensive one, for 100-120 thousand and get a very decent performance. Although for the same money you can put yourself a very decent Core i7 and 32GB DDR4 + 480 gig SSD. Plus a second hard drive for storing backups, 1TB is acceptable. It will fly in such a way that you will already swing.
If you need specific help with the selection, please contact, I will help. You just need to understand the size of the budget.

Answer 2

Yes, video cards are often used in scientific calculations, password brute-force tasks (fail-breakers often use them), well, or in special tasks where many, many parallel threads are required, but you will not encounter the above tasks with a 99.9% probability.
Video cards of cheap or average cost simply will not be able to give a significant increase.