what are pipelines in a video card?

Question

what are pipelines in a video card?

Answer 1

simply they are pipes which convey graphic informations

more pipelines the better graphic it has

Answer 2

The pipeline is the sequence of steps that your GPU carries out to transform the vertices, textures, and other data from your application into the actual image that you see on the screen.



On modern GPUs, the pipeline is divided into two major steps:



1. Transformation and lighting (T&L)

2. Rasterization



These steps can also be thought of as:



1. Vertex shader evaluation

2. Pixel shader evaluation



Each of these can then be broken down into smaller steps.

Answer 3

Mostly marketing crud, but they do serve a technical purpose.



Very quickly they're used to indicate two things. 1st how many different operations can be computed in parallel (at the same time), and for each of those channels how many operations can be in process at once.



Let's try this another way. Imagine a supermarket. What makes the processing of customers quick are two things. How many cash registers there are, and how many people you allow to queue at each one. Each lane is a pipeline.



If you have 100 lanes but only allow 1 customer per lane, you're slow, if you only have 1 lane but allow 100 customers, it's still not good. 100 lanes with 100 customers is good. In graphic card land the 99 waiting customers per lane are busy organizing their carts for optimal checkout speed which means that they're not just sitting around.