3D Rendering Performance.

[Kwipper]

Now with 3D Graphic Cards, it is known that the number of megabytes that it has doesn't really reflect the horsepower behind rendering 3D accelerated graphics. However, when looking at the detailed specifications of a graphics card, what stats specifically should a consumer look for? Which stats reflect the true horsepower behind rendering 3D accelerated graphics?

[Mike]

http://www.gpureview.com/memory-bandwidth-article-356.html
http://www.gpureview.com/shader-operations-article-357.html

Memory bandwidth, shader operations/sec, and (in some cases) texture fill rate. Memory bandwidth is in intuitively obvious, shader ops/sec tell how much pixel shading horsepower you have, and texture fill rate describes how many multi-textured pixels you can pump to the screen.

EDIT: BTW, this is an excellent question. A LOT of people are very confused on this issue.

[Kwipper]

Memory Bandwith, Shader Operations and Texture Fill Rate. Is there a way to measure how much a game will use these things? If so then it should be easy to put a note on the game that says something like.....

This game has a maximum output of....

Memory Bandwith: 30 GB/sec
Shader Operations: 4500 Operations/sec
Pixel Fill Rate: 6000 MPixels/sec

If your graphics card does not meet or exceed these specifications then you WILL run into performance issues with the game.

[Mike]

Hmm...well games have so many options, different resolutions, different detail settings, different codepaths for different generations of hardware, etc...that it would be pointless to try to give such precise figures...

Even if they did, performance also depends on your processor, memory, disk fragmentation etc etc...