Which card, old to new?

[LGLA]

Hello all, need some advise on which card to buy, or better yet, going from the
old x800xl (AGP) made by ATI, curious whatever happened to the "pixel pipelines"
term these days? I noticed I can readily get a 3850 card in AGP, which is what
must be currently.

Would '320 Stream Processing Units' be the exact same thing as 'pixel pipelines'?

Help much appreciated!

 

[LGLA]

This is going to be a long answer...

Stream processing units (SPs) are ATi's DX10 equivalent of the vertex- and pixel shader units. The
X800XL had 6 vertex shaders and 16 pixel shaders. SPs are "unified", meaning they can do both
vertex- and pixel-shader work. However, each SP is simpler than a traditional shader unit and may
take more than one clock cycle to complete the same calculation. The 3850's 320 SPs have the
approximate capability of 128 traditional shader units, about six times that of the X800XL.

Pixel "pipelines" still exist; they just aren't catchy marketing buzzwords any more. The 3850 has
16 pixel pipelines, like the X800XL. This means performance in old games will improve only
proportionally to the 3850's clock advantage (667 MHz vs 400 MHz, assuming the cards follow ATi
reference clocks). Performance in modern shader-heavy games (e.g. Oblivion, Crysis, Call of Duty
4...) will improve tremendously if the rest of your system is decent.

F.O.O. that is a great answer just as I needed it, really much appreciated. It seems to be
still the same, 'you get what you pay for', no matter what. I am wondering if I shouldn't
go for an nVidia card next. I know the rest of my system is decent enough, the next vid-
card just has to be AGP.

Thanks again and sorry for being so late to answer, since the 16th.

Alex

 

[pokey man]

This is going to be a long answer...

Stream processing units (SPs) are ATi's DX10 equivalent of the vertex- and
pixel shader units. The X800XL had 6 vertex shaders and 16 pixel shaders.
SPs are "unified", meaning they can do both vertex- and pixel-shader work.
However, each SP is simpler than a traditional shader unit and may take more
than one clock cycle to complete the same calculation. The 3850's 320 SPs
have the approximate capability of 128 traditional shader units, about six
times that of the X800XL.

Pixel "pipelines" still exist; they just aren't catchy marketing buzzwords
any more. The 3850 has 16 pixel pipelines, like the X800XL.

Sounds like you could equate piplines with the width of the busspath in a
digital circuit or
wired pathways, correct me if i am wrong.

Pokeyman







This means

performance in old games will improve only proportionally to the 3850's
clock advantage (667 MHz vs 400 MHz, assuming the cards follow ATi reference
clocks). Performance in modern shader-heavy games (e.g. Oblivion, Crysis,
Call of Duty 4...) will improve tremendously if the rest of your system is
decent.