cores?, pipelines?, steam processors?

[fangot]

at the moment im running an XFX 8800GTS card, which is 3 years old now and cost about £330 back in 2007

and it has 96 pipelines/steam processors

and i am now looking at ATi cards, which list their cards with cores, now for £29 quid you can get a budget card with '80 cores'

and for £131 an ATi card with 800 cores, now obviously more is better

what is the difference between the 3 definitions; cores, pipelines and steam processors?

because for 10% (£30) of what my card cost you can buy a card with only 16 less cores today..... or are they different things if you get what im trying to say

 

[rhys216]

Same thing's, but their architecture/size vary allot.
Just go by their benchmark performance.

a 5850 for £200ish is probably what you want.

 

[fangot]

so even a cheapo ATi card today is better than my 8800 GTS ?

like this one £63.99: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-194-SP&groupid=701&catid=56&subcat=1274

 

[reflux]

now obviously more is better

Not actually true. See for example the GeForce GTX260 (with 216 stream processors) vs. the Radeon HD4870 (with 800 stream processors). The two cards perform roughly the same. The architecture is more important, so the only way to find the relative performance of cards is to read reviews.

If you were wanting to upgrade, I would say go for one of the above cards (or the 5770) as it would be about twice as fast as what you have at the moment. But don't ever make the mistake with graphics cards that more is better

 

[SteveOBHave]

at the moment im running an XFX 8800GTS card, which is 3 years old now and cost about £330 back in 2007

and it has 96 pipelines/steam processors

and i am now looking at ATi cards, which list their cards with cores, now for £29 quid you can get a budget card with '80 cores'

and for £131 an ATi card with 800 cores, now obviously more is better

what is the difference between the 3 definitions; cores, pipelines and steam processors?

because for 10% (£30) of what my card cost you can buy a card with only 16 less cores today..... or are they different things if you get what im trying to say

I'm looking at the same upgrade and I tend to follow the rule that if I can get double the performance out of new hardware at a reasonable price then I upgrade. So next pay I will be going for the 5850. It gives essentially double the performance of the 8800GTS.

 

[fangot]

yeah precisely that, i was just trying to get my head round the numbers

as i couldnt believe that £29 card today has only a few less cores than my £330 card

hence why i wanted to clear it up in my mind, so i know how much to spend, as i need as much bang for buck at the moment

 

[Strawberry]

If you want bang for your buck go for a 5850 or 5870.

 

[Owenb]

Nvidia cores are very different to ATi ones. All Nvidia's cores can do complex and simple instructions and are clocked at ~1500Mhz. ATi's cores are broken into groups of five. One of those can do complex and simple while the other 4 can only do simple instructions and are clocked at the same speed as the GPU(~800Mhz). In the end performance is very similar per watt/die size. As a rule of thumb an Nvidia core is ~3.5 times faster than an ATi core.

 

[fangot]

ahh, that is very useful detailed info, thanks.

 

[fangot]

so 96 nvidia cores is roughly equal to how many ATi cores Owen ?

 

[Monkeynut]

so 96 nvidia cores is roughly equal to how many ATi cores Owen ?

The rough estimate is get the ATi cores and divide them by 5 to get the Nvidia equivalent. Of course, it isn't always as black and white as this as the cards use memory bandwidth differently etc.