Fragment Pipeline

Posted By: Michael Thomas - 03:51:36 Tue, August 15, 2006

Short Version

A fragment pipeline refers to a pixel shader processing pipeline. Note that this is not the same as a 'pixel pipeline', it is simply one portion of a pixel pipeline.

Does It Matter?

Yes, definitely. The number of fragment pipelines has a direct correlation to the performance of a given card.

Long Version

These days the name of the game is processing pixel shader programs. Pixel shader programs are what produce all the cool effects in modern video games, like lens flares, light blooms, and heat distortions. Since these programs have to run for every single pixel on the screen, it stands to reason that more of them means faster rendering.

13 Comments

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 1:40:33 AM

anonymous
guest

What's with the bracketed values for the different pipelines? ex) the GeForce 6600 AGP says:

"Fragment Pipeline: 8 (16)"

Monday, April 09, 2007 4:46:13 AM

GargoyleBG
guest

eventually unlockable pipelines, 6800LE AGP can be unlocked to 6800 or 6800GT with riva tuner

Monday, April 30, 2007 8:32:48 PM

hoodlum54
guest

the brackets are disabled pipelines...they can be disabled because they didn't work well, or because the company wants to make the card cheaper.

any word on being able to enable the disabled pipelines on a 8800gts to make it more like the gtx? Any threat to the hardware?

Thursday, May 10, 2007 11:20:16 PM

anonymous
guest

As far as I know, the 8600 GTS uses a different GPU than the 8800 series, so there are no disabled pipelines/stream processors on it.

Monday, May 14, 2007 3:52:36 PM

anonymous
guest

(8)is stock
16 means how much u can overclock it to

Monday, May 14, 2007 3:54:00 PM

anonymous
guest

the 16 should have the ( ) not the 8....

Monday, May 14, 2007 4:26:23 PM

Mike
GPUReview Founder

When you see 8(16), that means that the card is only using 8 pipelines, but the chip actually has 16. In current generation hardware, it's almost completely impossible to enable disabled pipelines, even with a BIOS flash.

Sunday, August 26, 2007 12:47:53 PM

anonymous
guest

i have a ATi Radeon X850 XT PE AGP i would like 2 know what the best agp card? is it the ATi Radeon X850 XT PE AGP or the Radeon X1950 Pro agp card

Tuesday, October 23, 2007 7:05:49 AM

maltdryck
guest

The Radeon X1950 Pro AGP card is superior to the Radeon X850 XT PE AGP. Over 50% performance boost, depending on your CPU, what game you're running, resolution and quality settings.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 10:31:11 AM

kljaja
guest

i had x800xt PE..and i am playing COD2 on extreme details...NFS MW too(on higher settings)..x850xt is like mine...and..mines brutal

Dont know whats that x1950??it must be extreamly fast

Sunday, February 10, 2008 6:42:18 AM

wyz135
Senior Member

seriously, I don't know why the hell they want to lock the pipelines, they can get much better performance without locking it

Tuesday, June 10, 2008 10:21:17 AM

Radiator
Senior Member

They lock them if they don't pass the quality inspection - the chip wouldn't function properly if they weren't disabled .

Sunday, July 26, 2009 5:14:00 AM

LostDude
n00b

Manufacturers (i.e. ATi/AMD & nVidia) lock pipelines for differentiation of models. It's to do with mass manufacturing costs. They use the same core for different models to cut costs in making them. Take the automotive industry for example, there can be a few varying models of cars all running the same engine, but with different features as well as other luxury features which define each model. Same concept.

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