There has been an explosion of machine learning and the like lately, which use GPUs to do a lot of the computation. We have several threads here about deep learning with google’s deep dream software, which will take an eon to compute on integrated graphics. It took a long time to run deepdreamer on my GTX970!
GPU acceleration is great for people in imaging, as it speeds things up a lot (given that the application supports it). For example, I was stitching a pretty big hugin project: on the machine with integrated intel graphics and 32GB RAM, the stitching took 8.5 hours; on the machine with 16GB RAM and an nVidia GTX970, it took 1.5 hours. Both machines have similar i5 CPUs. 