Is there a way to use a GPU to do the initial block verification? If not, I think this is a feature the developer(s) should consider adding.
By design it's very very fast to verify a block compared to generating. A CPU has more than enough processing power.
I may be wrong about where the bottleneck is, but I was referring to the initial verification of the 100,000 existing blocks when you first start using the client.
The problem with including GPU related features in the main client is that GPU computing is very hardware / operating system dependent. At the very least, installing additional software or drivers is required.
Hmm, has some kind of standardized plugin architecture been considered (aside from the current RPC method)? You could even throw in a few default plugins for each OS/popular GPU combination. Would it be unsafe?