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To give you an more understandable example: the X1800 could manage 60 million Pixel shader operations per second. The X1900 can do 166 million. With the extensive Shader Model 2 and 3 that alone is the money shot right there and yeah let's not forget that Shader Model 3.0 finally became very important.
| What is a shader ? |
| What do we need to render a three dimensional object; 2D on your monitor? We start off by building some sort of structure that has a surface, that surface is being built from triangles and why triangles? They are quick to calculate. How's each triangle being processed? Each triangle has to be transformed according to its relative position and orientation to the viewer. Each of the three vertices the triangle is made up of is transformed to its proper view space position. The next step is to light the triangle by taking the transformed vertices and applying a lighting calculation for every light defined in the scene. At last the triangle needs to be projected to the screen in order to rasterize it. During rasterization the triangle will be shaded and textured. |
