Kiwi university student Joe Ling used a $400 graphics card to discover orphan planets in the universe. No word if the card rendered the ghosts of noobs slain in battle.:
Without the gaming card it would take hundreds of computers to configure the information and cost thousands of dollars, Mr Ling says.
It would normally take one month to complete processing on a normal desktop computer, but with the graphics processing unit inside the gaming card it takes only six hours.
About 10 giant free-floating gas planets have been discovered. They are believed to not be orbiting stars.
Mr Ling’s supervisor and computer scientist Ian Bond led the team to discover the planets.
“They’re giant planets in our galaxy, around the size of Jupiter and somewhere between us and those distant background stars,” he says.