So I've always been under the impression that doing work on the GPU is always faster than on the CPU. Because of this, in OpenGL, I usually try to do intensive tasks in shaders so they get the speed boost from the GPU. However, now I'm starting to realize that some things simply work better on the CPU and actually perform worse on the GPU (particularly when a geometry shader is involved). For example, in a recent project I did involving procedurally generated terrain, I tried passing a grid of single triangles into a geometry shader, and tesselated each of these triangles into quads with 400 vertices whose height was determined by a noise function. This worked fine, and looked great, but easily maxed out the GPU with only 25 base triangles and caused a very slow framerate. I then discovered that tesselating on the CPU instead, and setting the height (using noise function) in the vertex shader was actually faster! This prompted me to question the benefits of using the GPU as much as possible...

So, I was wondering if someone could describe the general pros and cons of using the GPU vs CPU for intensive graphics tasks. I know this mainly comes down to what your trying to achieve, so if necessary, use the above scenario to discuss why the "CPU + vertex shader" was actually faster than doing everything in the geometry shader on the GPU. It's possible my hardware (newest macbook pro) isn't optomized well for the geometry shader (thus causing the slow framerate). Also, I read that the vertex shader is very good with parallelism, and would love a quick explanation of how this may have played a role in speeding up my procedural terrain. Any info/advice about CPU/GPU/shaders would be awesome!