Office 2010 Requires a GPU

Microsoft has published the hardware requirements for the upcoming Office 2010 suite, and people noticed one surprising addition: A DirectX compatible Video Processor.  Over at the TechNet blog, Microsoft explains why:

If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).

I can’t imagine Word using GPU for faster spell checking, but if it makes Charts & Graphs faster that would be welcome.  I do shudder to think of the many new tortuous animations and slide transitions they will add to PowerPoint now.

At least now all you spreadsheet junkies have an excuse to ask for a Quadro card.

via Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering : Office 2010 System Requirements.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Hardware gpgpu, microsoft