Yup, there's an increasing amount of GPU use these days, mostly related to soup searching -- see https://catagolue.hatsya.com/home for the software and a tabulation of results from the last several years of collaborative searching.

Caching is very very heavily used for running the biggest universes, which are truly mind-bendingly large. Golly's "HashLife" algorithm can in practice handle patterns that are over a trillion cells in each dimension:

  https://conwaylife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?&p=153609#p153609

Patterns with interesting behavior very often have a lot of repeating patterns, with the interesting stuff happening as complex interactions between those predictable patterns. HashLife capitalizes on remembering interactions that it has seen before, so basically the more memory your computer has available, the better HashLife will do in the long run at simulating that type of pattern.