Frick How much impact will those extra ROP's and TMU's have? I have not looked into GPU designs and how the stuff in them affects performance since the Radeon R200/300 series.



Because the GK208 version of the GT 640 have half the ROPs and TMUs. I hope it will not get much hotter, because I'm after a decent low profile card that is not too loud.

I don't believe that doubling the ROPs count will have any impact on the performance in this case. As you can clearly see, the hardware is pretty much a low-end solution for upgrading budget PCs of Pentium G9650/Arrandale era, I'm pretty sure that it won't go into any newly built PC (because of adequate prices on current products of this niche, GTX 750 and R7 260X).Talking about ROP performance impact, I can share some of my personal experience (however, I highly recommend to contact game developers if you want to have an advanced knowledge of this theme). If you use your GPU for general-purpose computing (let's say we have a simple C++ AMP application that multiplies two square matrices of size 512 both), you don't explicitly direct your compiler to make any use of ROPs. If we take a look at the whole graphics computing pipeline, we'll see that there's no atomic task that we can force to be executed with ROP logic w/ GPGPU instruments. Keep in mind that it doesn't mean that they're not being used when you execute your GPU-accelerated app, we just don't say anywhere in our code that we care about them. In specific tasks (like programming game engines), we generally use HLSL programming language, which is not that different in terms of compile-time product. Basically, it allows us to go at "lower" level while writing code so we can directly manipulate every single piece of GPU logic available (yeah, and ROPs, too). When the code is compiled, we can use "profiler" tools given us by GPU manufacturers or Microsoft too see which part of our code is being slower then expected. That way we'll be able to optimize it. The exact same thing goes to TMU's - they're just a specific part of GPU logic that makes its job the way it was designed to: we can use it explicitly if we need to, or we can just forget about them if we're writing more general-purpose code. The impact will differ: I'd say, we won't benefit from extra ROPs/TMUs in GPGPU apps, but in games there will be a small difference.