What exacty is card gpu ?

Have a NVIDIA GeForce GT 740 running my 3 monitor system....have noticed I have a few icons in the system tray that say they are running on the NVIDIA GPU ? What exactly is this 'GPU'...I must have set something in the NVIDIA control panel recently to activate this since is only been displaying for a few weeks.

Does this mean these programs are running of the NVIDIA rather than the system GPU ?? and what's the benefit/advantage/drawbacks with this ?

Thanks....TiminAz

Notmallysoftware run on the CPU but often a GPU is more powerful for some types of load so then it can be used for greater speed and to lessen the load on the CPU

The icon is an option in the nVidia Control Panel->Desktop->Display GPU Activity Icon...

It indicates that those applications are using the nVidia chip for any number of reasons. For instance, Firefox uses hardware acceleration for video decoding. Other applications (including Windows itself) use 3D rendering APIs for GUI display.

As Samuria says, the system uses the GPU when it's better at some task than the CPU. You shouldn't be concerned with this, especially since you only have one GPU in your system. Laptop users may need to be more careful since the discrete GPU uses more power than the integrated GPU, and having Dropbox powering up your discrete GPU so it can display some windows would be a waste of power.

You have one GPU in your system the Nvidia GT 740. That just shows you some of the applications which are using the GPU.
Rather pointless as everything is using that GPU. I would switch it off, totally useless info.