ROP Pixel Pipelines (Raster Operations)

How many pixels can actually be rendered per clock cycle depends in no small part on the driver settings and the 3D engine of the game being played. NVIDIA furnishes the following example to illustrate this point:

Compared to NV35 / 38, the new ROP engine has seen quite a number of improvements, such as the new rotated grid anti aliasing method and a more powerful memory interface. NVIDIA claims to have achieved a twofold memory performance increase compared to NV35. A direct comparison of theoretical memory bandwidth based on memory frequency (425 MHz for NV35, 550 MHz for NV40) makes it obvious that this improvement is not achieved through higher clockspeeds alone. The benchmarks scores at 1600x1200 with FSAA enabled back up NVIDIA's claims quite impressively.

The ROP subsystem o the GeForce 6800 comprises:

• 16 pixels per clock Color & Z
• 32 pixels per clock Z-only
• 64-bit FP Frame Buffer Blending
• Lossless Color & Z-Compression
• High Quality AA - Rotated Grid
• Full MRT Support
• Accelerated Shadow Rendering