this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
200 points (97.6% liked)
Technology
63082 readers
3547 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
ROP?
Basically, the ROPs are in charge of the final stage of rendering a frame.
They are discrete, physical components of the GPU.
GPUs at this point are quite complex boards of many specialized kinds of processors passing information to and from each other.
Tensor cores, RT cores, CUDA cores, ROPs, etc... these are all specialized processors, specializing in different kinds of computations.
ROPs, Raster Output Processors, do varying kinds of postprocessing on the almost final stage of a rendered frame, assemble the data from other parts of the GPU and then push the finalized, rastered 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 it's 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.
Wow thank you for the explanation! That made it very clear.
Thank you for the explanation!
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
Ok, it's Raster Operations Pipeline for anyone who doesn't want to read that far.
Edit: In this context it is probably Raster Output Processor, as sp3ctr4l points out.
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 flow of different stages of rendering, the verb or action that the physical Raster Output Processors actually perform. EDIT: Or perform a part of, a stage of.
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.