A question about Unified Shaders against Pixel Shaders.

[Urian]

I have seen in the specs that an Unified Shader can do 2 instructions per hz and that the Pixel Shader from the ATI X1000 series and GeForce 7x series can do 5 instructions per cycle.

Are this numbers important for graphics performance or are meaningless?

 

[Robert.L]

I have seen in the specs that an Unified Shader can do 2 instructions per hz and that the Pixel Shader from the ATI X1000 series and GeForce 7x series can do 5 instructions per cycle.

Are this numbers important for graphics performance or are meaningless?

I thought that x100 series did 4 op's per cycle and it's not meanigless but cg compilers won't really produce code that will maintain that peak 5 or 4 ops per cycle I could be wrong though.

 

[Dave Baumann]

There's nothing intrinsically linked to a unified shader, or not, that dictates the number of ops per cycle, its a question of design. A unified shader can be built to do 300 ops per cycle and non-unified can do 1 (some do, in fact), although the more ops that are achievable per cycle the less likely that peak will be hit, generally speaking.