nvidia GeForce 6800...

[blazerazor]

Evga states is has 12 pipes on the spec sheet on web site Link

but that doent make sense to me. The 6800gt and ultra both use 16 pipes. I thought the 'pipes where the travel lines between the gpu and the memory chips. There are 8 Ram chips on these cards. So two 'Pipes' to each chip (ddr) hence 16 pipes. yes/no. ?

If true, how does the 6800 128 ddr version get 12 pipes from? Are two ram chips just takin it easy?

 

[Schadenfroh]

no, your thinking about memory bus

 

[Acanthus]

completely off.

i think schadenfroh is right, youre thinkin of the memory bus, which is 128 or 256bit.

 

[JBT]

the 6800 has 12 pipes. It has to do with how the textures are processed inside the GPU. NOT the memory bus.

 

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: JBT
the 6800 has 12 pipes. It has to do with how the textures are processed inside the GPU. NOT the memory bus.

And just to clarify that further, the vanilla 6800 is 12 pipes, the GT and the Ultra are 16 pipes.

 

[Pete]

Pixel pipelines are a separate issue from memory bus bandwidth. They'er not physical pipelines, like oil pipelines. Pipelining means breaking down a process into several smaller steps that occur one after the other, which is what happens in a pixel pipeline. A 16-pipe card has 16 of those pipelines, to give it the ability to output 16 pixels per clock (with more than that in flight, depending on the number of pipeline stages).