Talk:Graphics pipeline

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Contents 1 Pictures 2 Question: 3 Shader coordination issue 4 This is really not much more than a stub 5 Pixel pipeline

[edit] Pictures

I'm currently a computer science major, specializing in computer graphics. Some images would really help this article out, but I have none that I know are copyright free.

Seasage 21:47, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

^^^lol. Computer Science is a hard job to get now days, because here in the U.S. the companies can pay 5 Asians to do the work for 5 times less than what you'd expect to be paid.

BTW, I'm study Mechanical Engineering right now.

[edit] Question:

Why does it matter how many pipe lines a graphics card has? I've been trying to work out why a 6600 graphics card (nvidia) with a slower clock speed on the GPU and slower ram should be better then a 5800 or a 5900 with a higher amount of memory bandwidth and GPU Processing power. I understand the the 6xxx series has updated architeture and instruction sets, but in terms of naked processing power, why is it that pipe lines seem to be mentioned quite alot?

Because most of the time, doubling the pipelines effectively doubles the fillrate. I'm not sure I understand what you're trying to ask.

MaxDZ8 talk 09:36, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

More specifically, many tasks within a stage are independent of each other. For example, creating the transform matrix must be done in order, but all vertices can be transformed by a matrix at the same time. The same goes with shading (assuming that the vertices/pixels being interpolated from have been determined already), clipping, culling, etc. Because these tasks are independent, they gain nearly a full n-fold increase in speed when you increase the number of pipes n-fold. This is fairly uncommon in computers, because many problems cannot be easily broken down independently, and therefore doubling the power gives you (sometimes significantly) less than double the speed.

Thomasbouldin 16:59, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shader coordination issue

I have been asked again to update shader again. I think the biggest need is to have diagrams. Since the shader-based pipe is an evolution of this, I think we should really try to coordinate an effort to get the things up to date.
MaxDZ8 talk 09:36, 1 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] This is really not much more than a stub

The graphics pipeline goes so much deeper than this. What about the difference between culling & clipping? What about the different stages of transformations: model, world, and camera/perspective? This would also help give readers references to other pages so they could have a better conceptual model of how this all works together. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Thomasbouldin (talk • contribs) 17:20, 4 April 2007 (UTC).

I agree. It would need some work. As a side note, I am feeling the need for a 4th generation shading pipeline page.
MaxDZ8 talk 08:18, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pixel pipeline

How does this topic relate with a Pixel pipeline? Bakkster Man 16:04, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

The pixel pipeline is the last logical part of the graphics pipe, before raster operations. It should be merged.
MaxDZ8 talk 05:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree, it should be merged. At the same time, this page needs some serious cleanup and lots of diagrams and math references. I don't have time to add it now, but the OpenGL "Red Book" is a good reference... Here's one portion of the pipeline, from page 98:

object coordinates --[modelview matrix]--> eye coordinates --[projection matrix]--> clip coordinates --[ Perspective division ]--> Normalized device coordinates --[Viewport transformation]--> window coordinates.

That's the geometry portion. —Ben FrantzDale (talk) 01:02, 6 February 2008 (UTC)