CUDA Cores vs PixelPipelines?

[robotsneedhugs2]

I'm going to be upgrading this fall from a 6+ year old gaming PC. I'm curious how much of a performance increase I'm going to get. For example, I'm upgrading from 3GB 400MHz DDR1 to 8GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, yielding roughly a 370% performance increase. I'm not sure if this is how it actually works, but it's fun to think so.

Anyway, on to the point of this. I currently have an ATI Radeon X1900XT GPU. The Newegg description states the card has 16 PixelPipelines with 48 shader processors. I don't know what the Nvidia equivalent was. Can this be compared at all to modern CUDA cores? Or is it completely different?

 

[anthony8989]

I'm going to be upgrading this fall from a 6+ year old gaming PC. I'm curious how much of a performance increase I'm going to get. For example, I'm upgrading from 3GB 400MHz DDR1 to 8GB 1866MHz DDR3 RAM, yielding roughly a 370% performance increase. I'm not sure if this is how it actually works, but it's fun to think so.

Anyway, on to the point of this. I currently have an ATI Radeon X1900XT GPU. The Newegg description states the card has 16 PixelPipelines with 48 shader processors. I don't know what the Nvidia equivalent was. Can this be compared at all to modern CUDA cores? Or is it completely different?

CUDA Core is a platform that among other things, completes parallel computation in Nvidia's GPU's. Unlike CPU's which complete extremely fast linear computations, GPU's make multiple parallel computations and the CUDA core is the software that allows developers to access and modify the way the GPU interacts with the data it receives.
Pixel Pipelines are a method of drawing images on a video display. It is essentially a way of taking geometric arrays and quickly assembling them into pixel-based 3d images.

So no you can't really compare Pixel Pipelines to CUDA Cores.

Your X1900XT is close to (but less than) a GT 630 which is pretty low in terms of performance power. Any GPU that is /above a GT 640 would give you a big notable increase in gaming performance.