this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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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.

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[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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@lemux.minnix.dev 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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

[–] Anissem@lemmy.ml 9 points 11 months ago

I’ve finally made the donut

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Blender sounds very cool but also very intimidating ^^

[–] orbitz@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I bought a course from udemy to learn it, helps cause you can follow along in an organized order. I actually haven't touched it much since but it was fun to go through. Just make sure to buy their courses on sale if you do, otherwise they can get pretty pricey.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 11 months ago

We have access to them from work, perhaps I can use that.

[–] helix@feddit.org 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] Albbi@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago

There's also GIMPS for searching for the largest prime number.

[–] Chozo@fedia.io 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hm didn't think of that but I guess it could be build in to my videos to make them more entertaining to watch

[–] wagesj45@fedia.io 3 points 11 months ago
[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 11 months ago

Hm, never heard of ComfyUI, will check it out!

[–] webghost0101@sopuli.xyz 6 points 11 months 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)

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

You can play most vidja james with the graphics maxed out. At least @ 1080p on that one.

[–] StereoTypo@beehaw.org 5 points 11 months ago

Ooh, I have a really good answer! Go check out the shadertoy website and see all sorts of OpenGL wizardry running smoothly on your GPU! Shadertoy.com

[–] datavoid@lemmy.ml 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Use BOINC to share the love

[–] Nighed@feddit.uk 2 points 11 months ago

With the obvious disclaimer that it will hike your electricity bill.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Have a bunch of fun with Stable Diffusion and whatever models you feel like downloading on CivitAI.

[–] jeena@piefed.jeena.net 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Oh, wow, I didn't realize that would be so much fun! And it's somehow faster than the ones online too, and you can really do a lot with all the different models you can download!

[–] uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Those front hooves scare me

[–] BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Surprised that the first go to isn't the tiny horse attached to the back of the main one or the fact that the astronaut also has no feet.

[–] uninvitedguest@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

The small horse is just getting a good sniff, and no feet isn't unsettling.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Well, the great thing about Stable Diffusion is that you can inpaint things to fix small issues like that.

What people don't get about AI art, is that the mistakes it makes are because somebody spent five minutes making an image and didn't bother with the extra few hours of polish.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 10 months ago

It's been a while since I played with it, but the Dynamic Prompts extension has some options for creating random prompts and combinations. It's neat to have it run through a hundred images to see what it creates, find the interesting ones, and then focus on that prompt for some more refined images. Or upscale and inpaint/outpaint the ones you want.