🌱📊 Towards a sustainable use of GPUs in Graphics Research 📊🌱

Talk — SIGGRAPH 2025

Drawing of people raising their hand
Each circled dot represent a citation of a GPU in a paper, each colored segment represents a GPU. We note that 87% of GPUs reported in research papers (above the blue line) are available to less than 20% of the consumer-level user base at publication time.

Contents #

Abstract #

We surveyed 888 SIGGRAPH papers from 2018-2024 and gathered author-reported GPU models. By contextualizing the hardware reported in papers with available data of consumers' hardware, we demonstrate that research is consistently developed and tested on new high-end devices that do not reflect the state of the consumer-level market.

Code & Data #

We provide in the GitHub repository eliemichel/sustainable-gpu-usage-data the full list of scripts that we used to extract data and create figures for this talk. The raw paper data cannot be shared directly without the approval of the publisher, but sample data is provided for the sake of reproducibility.

See also #

This talk was conceived as a follow-up of a Birds of a Feather session from SIGGRAPH 2024: The Environmental Impact of Computer Graphics.

Citation #

You may cite this talk in future work; here is how we suggest to do it (when using BibTeX):

@inproceedings{yu2025, author = {Yu, Emilie and Michel, Elie and Crespel, Octave and Paris, Axel and H\"{a}hnlein, Felix}, title = {Towards a sustainable use of GPUs in Graphics Research}, year = {2025}, isbn = {9798400715419}, publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, doi = {10.1145/3721239.3734084}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques Conference Talks}, articleno = {18}, numpages = {3}, series = {SIGGRAPH Talks '25} }