this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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My dad told me to look into something called "parallel computing" but I don't really understand what it is or how to put it into practice.

I have a raspberry pi 4, and two windows computers.

I can wipe the raspberry pi and one windows computer, but I am looking to run games (that can't currently run with just the one computer) on the other windows computer.

I apologize if I'm being dumb, I don't know as much about computers as I'd like.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Parallel computing is something where you break a big task into a bunch of little tasks that can be completed in parallel by a bunch of different computers. It's something you do on specific problems, rather than something you'd use to speed up video games. Typically, you'd parallelize something like doing a big physical simulation that could take weeks to complete, not something that needs to complete all the math for a frame in 1/60th of a second.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

^ This.

Even simple stuff like SLI (having multiple GPUs for rendering games) can be complicated and not widely supported anymore. Parallel computing is basically reserved for servers at this point (which makes sense, if you're running something intensive like an AI service, you don't want to put it all on one server.)

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The short answer is: you don't, sorry

The slightly less short answer is: when people are working on huge problems, they'll come up with ways to split that problem into smaller chunks that can be solved individually, and then you could use parallel computing to solve all those little chunks at the same time across many different computers. It's NOT something you can just do with any program you want, like a video game.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Alright, thanks for your answer.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

sell one of the computers on craigslist and buy a graphics card with the money from that

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can't really buy anything, as I'm 16 and don't have a job or an allowance.

The other windows computer is my brother's old one. (he is building a new computer) The raspberry pi is my own. (I got it for christmas a few years back)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

We've all been there. I remember back in high school scavenging every free-to-play game on the play store. To this day I have no standards for graphics and frame-rates, since I always gamed on old and low-end hardware. Something I didn't know back then (maybe it wasn't true back then); there are plenty of great indie games that are dirt cheap and light enough run on old laptops. might have to tailor your tastes in that direction for a while to match your budget. I think there were plenty of this type of game in this post and its comments.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Others have covered why you can't really do what you're asking. The upshot is that there's decades of old PC games that'll run on the hardware you do have. Look into RetroPie for those raspberries, and hunt around Steam for games that'll meet whatever your spec is.

It's also not exactly what you're asking, but a lot of older games still hold up, especially when you're broke and bored.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago
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