Videocard Techniques (pixel and vectorshading amongst things)

[Jorden]

I got to say I'm a boon when it comes to all the new things in the videocard world, and you may be as well. So again I need help, although I'll look these fori over for laymans explanations about some of the things said below.

If you know better, don't hesitate to email me at elst93@wxs.nl and I'll post your answer in this thread.

The things we want answers on are:

• Core clock
• Memory clock
• Render pipelines count
• Texturing units count
• Fillrate (explained below)
• Processing speed (triangles/sec )
• Memory bandwidth
• Scalable architecture

Himself explained Fillrate as this:
Fillrate is a measure of the rate at which a video card can fill the screen with pixels.
The units are derived from marketing departments and vary from card to card. Nobody can agree on whether the terms applies to plain pixels or pixels with sprinkles on top.

While Heiney explained it like:
Yeah, fillrate is about as useful as Polygon rate. It's all extremely variable depending on what setup you test with. Different size pixels, different size polygons, polygon complexity, color depth, activated features, etc.

Honestly, the only way you can compare cards is benchmarks of the games you want to play on them.

That brings on the questions of what the heck are:

• Pixels
• Polygons
• Polygon complexity
• etc.

Jord.

[Jorden]

Go check the article at Tweak3D.net to learn more about these techniques.