pixel Pipelines

[SBOSlayer]

Hey all!

Ok i do computer engineering etc and all but, that doesn't cover hardware....

I've done computer Architecture etc, but It's weird nothing has ever covered graphics cards I know a lot about Clock Speeds and other such things to look at, however can someone explain the mystery which is pixel pipelines? I'm looking to get a new graphics card and the more pipelines the better, but how can you tell how many pipelines it has? A lot sites don't specify? I mean is there some kind of calculation to work it out?

Any advice or explanation?

Thank you for your help in advance :)

 

[edijs]

I do computer engineering, too, and all they covered for me was some low-end graphics cards ,which supported dx8 at max :D

You can't calculate pipelines, at least I haven't heard of that.

As to finding out how many pipelines a card has, you need to get to he standard specifications of the GPU on the manufacturers website - ie ATI or Nvidia or something like Tomshardware cause they usually look at he GPu itself, not the stuff vendors add to the card (like XFX OC's them, BFG OC's them as well - some vendors add more memory than others and so on.) As much as I know, there is a fixed number of pipelines, which then are locked/unlocked according to that cards targeted market.

But pipelines are by far not the only thing that tells one how good the card is. They invent new kinds of processors and stuff like stream processors and so on. usually Cards don't have pixel pipelines anymore.

See this article. It basically says it all. That's obsolete.

 

[SBOSlayer]

Thank you so much for ur help :) My course isn't hardware oriented, although i understand mostly all components, but for some reason the Graphics card specifications are lost on me... and i find it a bit well not confussing, but un-reasuring since there are different variences and sometimes the site doesn't specify some stuff.

In anycase, i really do appreciate the help :)

All the best for ur course :)