For the first time in my life I own a PC with a reasonable powerful dedicated graphics card. It’s the Nvidia RTX 3060 with 12GB VRAM. I know it’s older and so on but before that I only had laptops and integrated GPUs which were not very powerful.

I bought it specifically to edit videos and it works very well for it. But I edit videos perhaps once a month and the rest of the time the GPU is practically idling.

What I found is that I can run up to 14b big LLMs on it, so I set it up and am using it for that too, and it’s really a lot of fun which I didn’t quite expect.

And therefore I’m wondering what other fun things I could do with this graphics card, any tips?

Gaming is not very entertaining to me, I do it even more seldom than video editing, so I’m looking for other things.

  • Chozo@fedia.io
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    8 hours ago

    Adjacent to video editing, do you have any interest in visual effects? Lots of really sophisticated CGI and other VFX in film can be done from consumer-grade GPUs like yours.

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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    11 hours ago

    I mean their main use case is gaming… And you can do a few more AI things, LLMs aside. For example generate pictures, voice cloning (or changing), you can have a vtuber avatar and do live-streams as an anime girl. Or run Jupyter Notebooks with arbitrary machine learning projects. Do virtual reality. Or run a big CAD program and design some objects. Maybe even run finite element method simulations to see how your workpiece will deform with stress…

  • badcodecat
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    11 hours ago

    download blender, turn on optix, and enter the rabbit hole ;)

  • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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    10 hours ago

    You can run an artificial life simulator. There basically a digital aquarium.

    This one (Project Alien) is beautiful and is made using nvidias cuda technology. You cant run it on amd. (Though i am certain amd has alternatives)

  • barsoap@lemm.ee
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    10 hours ago

    Go download ComfyUI (civitai is a good source of models) and Blender. A snappy cycles viewport is something to behold. Do simulation nodes run on GPU? If they do you can do all kinds of stuff with that.

    Oh, last but not least: You can swap to VRAM.