What is the streaming processor in the video card?

Stream processor The term first appeared in the eyes of the people also back to December 4, 2006, Nvidia on the day of the official release of the next generation of DX10 graphics 8800GTX, in the technical parameters of the table, do not see the usual use of two parameters: Pixel pipelines ( Pixel rendering pipeline) and vertex pipelines (vertex shading unit), replaced by a term: streaming processor, the Chinese translation is the Flow processor (also has called SP Unit, a meaning) its role is to handle the data transmitted by the CPU, Processed into digital signals that the display can identify.

The role of the streaming processor

Stream processor is a direct mapping of multimedia graphics data flow to the flow processor for processing, there are programmable and not programmable two kinds. The flow processor can optimize the shader engine more efficiently, it can process the flow data, also output a stream data, this stream data can be applied in other superscalar flow processor, the stream processor can be in group or large number of operation, thus greatly enhance the parallel processing ability. The actual effect is reflected in the removal of the edge of the object Sawtooth phenomenon, as well as the rendering speed of various effects.

The birth of a stream processor

In order to realize the requirement of unified rendering, programmable and callable of GPU internal unit, the efficiency of GPU is improved, the pixel pipelines (pixel rendering pipeline) and vertex pipelines (vertex coloring unit) are unified to become streaming Processor (stream processor).

The effect of the streaming processor

Each stream processor has a dedicated high-speed unit for decoding and executing streaming data. The onboard cache is a typical unit with a stream processor that can quickly enter and read data to complete the next rendering. Because of the different graphics flow processor architectures of NV and AMD, in general, it looks like NV's graphics flow processor is less than AMD's, but there is an equivalent Formula 1 NV video flow processors are equivalent to 4 to 5 AMD video card flow processors, can be equivalent to approximate estimates of the comparison between two of the graphics card.