Internal workings of a graphics card

Could somebody knowledgable please explain to me how things work in a graphics card?

For example, I know that the mobile version of NVIDIA GeForce 9800GTS has 64 shaders and that the more shaders the better, but what are actually these shaders? Are they separate min-processors? What are they and why do they have a different clock from the GPU core? If they are not part of the GPU core, what does the GPU core itself actually do? How come NVIDIA processors have so many fewer shaders for the same performance? I did read that their shaders are 5-way, but how does that work?

I did try to look thinks up first, but the very basic explanations don't explain this and the explanations that do go into those kinds of things are simply too technical, yet don't tend to directly answer these issues.

Thanks!

 

This puts thing a little better than i could:
http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=gethowto&number=3&howtopage=190&howtoID=72

 

Thanks for the link, it was quite helpful. So, am I understanding it correctly, if I say that a "Shader" is a physical part of the processor?

What makes a shader processor unit different from other processing units? Is it some sort of parallelism or something else? And how come one of NVIDIA's shader units is approximately equivalent to 5 of ATI's shader units?

 

The shader or stream processors are a physical part of the gpu. They are individual processors each running at their own frequency(shader clock) and do the vast bulk of the rendering work in games.

Nividia's shaders are 5-dimensional which i believe means they process 5 times the amount of streams of data as compaired to single dimensional shaders.

 

Thanks!

So what is it that makes a shader processor a shader processor rather than a 'normal'/'standard' processor? Yes, it is called shader because it is used for shading operations, but in terms of logic/structure/workings, how does it differ from a general processor?

Yes, I understand that they can process 5-times that amount of data (you mention 5 streams), but how is this possible? Is it some form of parallelism, so that each shader actually has 5 parallel shaders?

 

http://www.tweakguides.com/Graphics_1.html

 

Here is an indepth article on the modern GTX series architecture and videocards: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3334

Here is an indepth article on the modern HD4000 series architecture and videocards: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3341

If you manage to get through those (they are fairly well written) you will understand everything you need to know about how these cards work.