Stream Processors and 7800gtx question about stream processors.

O

Obiwanshinobi900

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 1, 2007
Messages
330
How important are stream processors? And how many stream processors does the 7800gtx 256 have? I can't find anywhere that says it.
 
It doesn't have Stream Processors. It uses Pixel Shaders, Vertex shaders instead of stream. Think of stream as the swiss army knife of GFX computing.
 
Obiwanshinobi900 said:
How important are stream processors? And how many stream processors does the 7800gtx 256 have? I can't find anywhere that says it.
Click to expand...

A 7800 GTX doesn't have Stream Processors. It's architecture was still a fixed pipeline design and it has 24 pipelines.

Stream Processors are very important, since they are basically the units responsible for graphics processing.
In the past, with fixed pipeline designs, there were specific units for pixels and vertexes, which means that if certain calculations involved mostly pixels and not so many vertexes (for example), the computational units for vertexes would do basically nothing.
With unified architectures, such as the one in G80 and its derivatives, Stream Processors can perform any kind of calculation and harmony is achieved, since all the computational units are working all the time, which is much more efficient.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top