What is ntoskrnl.exe and GPU 1-Copy?

What is ntoskrnl.exe and why is it using GPU 1-Copy? and what is even GPU 1-copy?

Courtesy of your friendly Co-Ppilot
Ntoskrnl.exe is the Windows NT Operating System Kernel — the core of Windows. It's always running as it handles memory management, process scheduling, hardware abstraction, and many low‑level system functions. Windows 10/11 offloads certain operations to the GPU. This is normal behavior when one has both integrated and discrete graphics.

These operations appear in Task Manager under:

• GPU 0 / GPU 1 – Copy
• GPU – Video Decode
• GPU – 3D

The “Copy” engine is a dedicated DMA engine on modern GPUs used for moving data, not rendering. So when you see a task assigned to GPU1-Copy it just means that the windows kernel is performing a GPU accelerated memory transfer.