OK. I am a video card noob. What is the difference between a pixel pipeline and a Pixel shader processor?

I ask because I have noticed that the x1900 series is carrying the tag Pixel Shader Processor and makes no reference to pixel pipe-lines anymore. I know the x1800 series and all the NVidia cards still talk about pipelines, so any help on this would be appreciated.

a pixel pipeline is a data path for data to flow to be processed by vertex units, pixel processors and the gpu. Pixel shaders are more commonly called shader models. So you have SM 2.0, and SM 3.0. The nvidia 6 series and 7 series have supported SM 3.0, and the ati X1000 seris also support SM 3.0. All of the SM 3.0 cards can do SM 2.0 processing as well.

I think you are a bit confused on this subject so ill let you read this and see if you can understand more about how vid cards work.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaders

I read that but it didn't really explain it well to me lol, so is a "pixel shader processor" basically the same as a pixel pipeline or is it an instruction set for the pixel pipeline, forgive my noobness

I'm aware this is quite an old thread, but considering that no one bothered to directly answer the question I felt I would offer an explanation for anyone who might come across this thread needing an answer.

Whenever you look at the lists of attributes of pre-DX10 cards, such as the Nvidia Geforce 7900 GT, or the ATI X1900XT, you will see the attribute "fragment pipeline", "pixel shader", or "pixel pipeline" listed (these are three different words for the same thing). Whenever you look at the lists of attributes of DX10 cards, such as the Geforce 8800 GT or the ATI 3870, you will see the word "pixel / fragment pipeline" replaced with "pixel shader processor".

The reason for this is that the "pixel shader processor" is a more advanced version of the "pixel / fragment pipeline" which can "hypothetically" take advantage of the more sophisticated Unified Shader Model which involves a more sophisticated iteration of Open GL and DX10 technology.

http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-7600-GT-PCI-E-card-385.html#
as you can see above the feature "fragment pipeline" is mentioned


http://www.gpureview.com/GeForce-9500-GT-card-574.html
as you can see above the attributes listed are only different in that "fragment pipeline" has been replaced with "pixel shader processor"

So basically: DX9 hardware = pixel or fragment pipeline, DX10 hardware = shader processor