pipelines

[Sotiris Katsikis]

On 8/1/06, yiorgos kapellakis <kapellakis at gmail.com> wrote:
> to montelo tis kartas einai SAPPHIRE ATI X1600PRO 256MB AGP TV-OUT DVI
> RETAIL

Now you re talking...
Twra pou eipes to modelo, boreis na pareis kai thn apadhsh:
apo edw:
http://forums.techpowerup.com/showthread.php?t=13758

sth 2h selida tha deis:

The X1600 has 4 ROPs (otherwise known as render operator units), 12
pixel shaders and 5 vertex shaders. (not 12 vertex pipelines ) Atitool
is telling you the amount of ROPs available in your card.

The term pixel pipeline is no longer used for the X1x00 series, as
each ROP can have multiple shader units. Take the X1900 for example,
it only has 16 ROPs, but it can perform 48 pixel shader operations per
cycle, making it faster than the 7800GTX's 24 ROPs, 24 pixel shaders
when it comes to rendering pixel shader intensive games.

Ati chose to put way more pixel shaders in their GPUs when they
realized future games would be more pixel shader intensive than vertex
shader intensive. This will change once the R600 with its "unified
shader" architecture is released, and game programers will be able to
decide how to put its (rumored) 64 shaders to use with the right
balance of pixel, vertex and geometry shaders, once DX10 becomes the
norm.

In terms of raw performance, the X850 (16 ROPs, 16 pixel shaders and 6
vertex shaders) is waaaay faster than the X1600, it doesn't support
some newer rendering technologies, but with DX10 cards just around the
corner, it shouldn't matter that much.



Opote opws katalavaineis den yparxei kati na ksekleidwseis, einai
thema arxitektonikhs ths kartas. (padws me ena grhgoro googlarisma
vrethike h lysh, kati hksere kai h sapphire :P).

Sotiris