The article is terribly written, you need to scroll way down in the article to find out what ROP means, despite the article using the acronym several times
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
ROP?
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
floofloof@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Ok, it’s Raster Operations Pipeline for anyone who doesn’t want to read that far.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Technically, the Raster Operations Pipeline is the entire process of actually rendering a frame, or, contextually and depending on what precise terminology is being used by what company for which architecture, it may only refer to the final stages of actually rendering the frame.
Raster Operations Pipeline is the process, the systematized floe, the verb, that the physical Raster Output Processors actually perform.
In this case, the Raster Operations Pipeline is hampered by the GPU missing 8 out of 176 Raster Output Processors.
Ie, its missing an amount of discrete physical components from the GPU board, and thus is less performant at actually rendering the Raster Operations Pipeline.
Nvidia is … pretty much very obviously at this point going out of its way to make the terminogy around its GPUs as confusing as possible, so that they can more easily do the equivalent of Star Trek esque technobabble to waive away and dismiss anyone who tries to actually dive in and understand what they’re actually doing.
sp3tr4l@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Basically, the ROPs are in charge of the final stage of rendering a frame.
They do varying kinds of postprocessing on the almost final stage of a rendered frame, and then push the finalized pixels to the frame buffer.
A rough analogy would that ROPs are in charge of the final editing pass on a paper or article before its published, with the analagous ‘research’, ‘fact verifying’, and ‘rough draft’ having already been done by other parts of the GPU first.
Maybe another analogy would be that ROPs are the ‘final assembly’ of a frame, if constructing a frame was like building a car or aircraft.
A simpler, more literal explanation is that the ROPs perform the final stage of rendering a frame before the GPU actually pushes it out for you to see.
So… if the GPU is missing 8 ROPs… the GPU is basically bottlenecking itself, internally.
fetter@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Wow thank you for the explanation! That made it very clear.
stoy@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
Thank you for the explanation!