GeForce FX is 4 pipes by 2 texture units?
After seeing this report at The Inquirer, we asked NVIDIA for clarification: Does the GeForce FX have four rendering pipes with two texture units each or eight with one each, as the world was led to believe? Here's the answer we received from NVIDIA:
GeForce FX 5800 and 5800 Ultra run at 8 pixels per clock for all of the following:We will unpack this statement for you shortly, but it appears Fraud at The Inq got this one right.a) z-rendering
For advanced applications (such as Doom3) *most* of the time is spent in these modes because of the advanced shadowing techniques that use shadow buffers, stencil testing and next-generation shaders that are longer and therefore make the apps "shading-bound" rather than "color fill-rate" bound.
b) stencil operations
c) texture operations
d) shader operations
Only color+Z rendering is done at 4 pixels per clock, all other modes (z, stencil, texture, shading) run at 8 pixels per clock.
The more advanced the application, the less percentage of total rendering is color, because more time is spent texturing, shading and doing advanced shadowing/lighting.
