Stream Processors..Am I missing something?

[jm240]

Hi all,

I always thought that the number of stream processors on a card was a good indication of how powerful the cards are. It seems like the ATI cards are storming ahead offering 800+ stream processors in comparison with my 7800GT card which had about 12!

The current ATI cards seem to have much higher specs than nVidia cards, are ATI the graphics leaders atm?

 

[Devil_Spawn]

i dont really know the specifics, but for some reason you have to divide the number ati shows by 5 i believe

 

[Duke]

Your card has pixel shader units not stream processors, so you can't compare them that way.

 

[TheCenturion]

Hi all,

I always thought that the number of stream processors on a card was a good indication of how powerful the cards are. It seems like the ATI cards are storming ahead offering 800+ stream processors in comparison with my 7800GT card which had about 12!

The current ATI cards seem to have much higher specs than nVidia cards, are ATI the graphics leaders atm?

the cards are designed in a different way, they have a different architecture, so you can't really use stream processors to evaluate cards, if you could, nvidia would have been out of business right now .
The best way to judge 2 different cards is to put them in the same system and see which one performs better. But to have a better understanding, you also need to compare prices and ascertain which card is better bang for buck.
eg: card A gets 100 fps in a game, but card B only gets 70, yet card A is £300 and card B is £80. Card A would be better for best performance, but card B would probably offer better value for money.

 

[Rroff]

To simplify it:

nVidia 7 series have fixed function pipelines so they do specific tasks and if they aren't doing those tasks they are basically idle and doing you no good.

nVidia 8 series and newer pipelines can do every type of processing so if a scene is heavy of one type and light on another you can bring a lot more of your potential processing power to work on the heavy stuff.

To over simplify even more each of the SPs on an ATI card can also do upto 4-5 things at once when commands are in certain patterns - giving them a theoretical number (which is listed as the number of SPs) but the real number of units is usually that number divided by 5 - comparing the actual performance to nVidia is hard to put a number on.