what happened to the term Pipelines?

[Rambusted]

I remember way back ati had a really good mid range card in the 9500 pro. I recall people being impressed with it and attributing its success to the amount of pixel pipelines it sported. I am pretty sure it used 8 as opposed to 4 found on the normal 9500. Whatever happened to the term pixel pipeline? Are they still present in modern cards? I know this question is noobish but im just trying to understand how the cards have progressed over the years. I ended up playing WoW and some Tribes 2 for years and never bothered staying on top of the tech because the games ran on my old rig just fine and were all i ever played.

 

[F120]

The pipeline is still there but instead of having separate vertex/pixel/geometry shaders, new cards since DX10 and afterwards have unified shaders that can do all of these tasks

 

[Rambusted]

wow so my 4870 has 100 times the amount of "pipes" that the 9500 pro had! Thats pretty cool tks for the info.

 

[SonicIce]

i dunno. they kind of stopped after 24 then they named them differently. im not sure if u can directly compare them anymore?

 

[lamedude]

NV started putting more pipelines than ROPs with NV43 and AMD putting more shaders than pipelines with RV530 so we had to start spelling everything out.