Is having more GPU shaders good for only 3D applications?

[delerious]

I am getting a new laptop that offers the choice of the Nvidia Quadro K4100M and K5100M GPUs.

The K4100M has 1152 shader cores, and the K5100M has 1536 shader cores. I've read that more shaders will improve performance for 3D applications such as games and CAD.

But will having more shaders improve performance for other things like Blu-Ray and HD video playback? What about video editing and encoding?

 

[Relayer]

Blue-Ray and HD video playback won't tax the GPU enough for it to matter. Video editing and encoding, assuming you are using an app that takes advantage of hardware acceleration, will show improvement as well. It might only be ~10% or so, it's not linear. It will improve performance for those apps though.

 

[LordEC911]

Blue-Ray and HD video playback won't tax the GPU enough for it to matter.

Video playback is usually handled by a fixed function hardware unit on the GPU.

 

[Liquid_Static]

Some video editing apps take advantage of CUDA or OpenCL, but not all do.