What is a ROP?

[gregoryvg]

Okay, this is one piece of information that stumps me. I generally understand what pixel pipelines and steam processors are for and that more is good. But what is a ROP and why should I care?

I see that low-end cards have 4 ROPs, mid-line cards tend to have 8 ROPs (like my HD 4670) and high-end cards havea round 16 ROPs. What do they do and how do they affect the performance of my video card? Links to articles discussing said topic would be most welcome.

 

[nosfe]

you shouldn't care, just look at reviews for ingame performance

 

[AzN]

More ROP you have the higher resolution you can run and improve AA performance as well.

 

[JAG87]

ROP units are the part of the GPU that create a raster image from vector graphics.

Everything in the GPU is processed as a vector and then it must be rasterized to be displayed on a pixel matrix.

The more ROP units a GPU has the faster it can compute this operation. Having a lot of ROP units is most beneficial when rendering extremely high resolutions.