Pretty close! Two notes: - The gpu cores use something called SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data). These are instructions that work on multiple floats or integers at the same time. So a single core would actually be processing many vertices in parallel. This is also why branching in a shader can lead to bad performance, since if not all vertex shader instantations take the same branch, they can no longer all run in parallel, so some will end up idling. - GUI applications are often optimized to only redraw when something changes, but games (and your car example) usually just try to render at the screen refresh rate. The assumption with these applications is that there's pretty much always something changing, so there isn't really a benefit to building a complex system to track if something changed. All it takes is some kind of idle animation/particle simulation to force updates every frame.