Skip to main content
cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Compete to become Power BI Data Viz World Champion! First round ends August 18th. Get started.

Reply
kjendro
Frequent Visitor

Better computing solutions

More of a technical question, but does the PowerBI desktop solution scale with more cores/threads? What about memory speed/size? Does Power BI use GPUs in calculations (especially in Power Query and data refresh)? Dealing with large datasets and looking to see if throwing more resources can improve down time.

1 REPLY 1
Greg_Deckler
Community Champion
Community Champion

Well, yes. Power BI's core technology is SSAS tabular cubes. Power BI Desktop actually runs an instance of SSAS under the hood and SSAS is quite scalable. On the Power Query side, this depends on how big your dataset is. Are we talking 10M, 100M or 1B rows here? But, if it is big enough, then you may need to look at other options such as Direct Query. Also, you should look at Incremental Refresh if it is import mode. Futhermore, you shouldn't be refreshing large datasets from the Desktop anyway really, use the Service.



Follow on LinkedIn
@ me in replies or I'll lose your thread!!!
Instead of a Kudo, please vote for this idea
Become an expert!: Enterprise DNA
External Tools: MSHGQM
YouTube Channel!: Microsoft Hates Greg
Latest book!:
DAX For Humans

DAX is easy, CALCULATE makes DAX hard...

Helpful resources

Announcements
August Power BI Update Carousel

Power BI Monthly Update - August 2025

Check out the August 2025 Power BI update to learn about new features.

August 2025 community update carousel

Fabric Community Update - August 2025

Find out what's new and trending in the Fabric community.

Top Solution Authors