how important is pixel shader? (GT 540M)

hi^^

i'm buying the samsung RF711 probably this week, i wanted a laptop with great features (second generation core i7, big and bright screen, high resolution, fast mid-range gpu that's comparable to ATIs 5650). after checking Nvidia Geforce GT 540M bench list, pixel shade is 96 while ATI 5650 is 400.

So, will i notice difference in gaming between the Nvidia 540M & ATI 5650? it's worth mentioning that in crysis 2, 540 gets 27fps while 5650 gets 26fps (on high) .

so what's the main noticeable difference?
thank u.

 

ATI and NVIDIA use different graphic architectures. You can't really compare them just by looking at specs.

Short answer. GT 540M > HD 5650
NVIDIA GeForce GT 540M - Notebookcheck.net Tech

You might see an improvement in some games and none in others.

 

As aylafan said, you can't compare AMD vs NVIDIA like apples vs apples. The architecture is different. 2 main examples : In NVIDIA, they use the core speed separate from the shader speed, meanwhile in AMD, the shader clock speed operates whithin the core clock ( core clock=/=shader clock in Nvidia and core clock=shader clock in AMD.

And 2nd, the shader arch. is different in AMD : AMD uses 5D shaders, while nvidia uses 1D. So, to compare them directly, you must divide the shader count of the AMD side by 5 in order to compare the shader number directly.

 

aylafan & Phistachio thank you guys for clearing that up i'm grateful for your help.

 

You are welcome!

The GT 540M is better by around 5-10%. It only has more 16 shaders, and it's GDDR3, just like the 5650.

But still, between those 2, I go with 540. If between 540 and 5730, I say 5730, due to optimus being very buggy.

 

Pixel shader is a thing, cuda cores/shaders (amd stream processors) are another.

Now as for pixel shader, is an array of graphics features implemented in a game that lets the card handle via hardware such things like lightning, textures compressions, polygon counts and so on. Its like direct x but more game/engine specific. Eg a card that handles pixel shaders 2 cannot render a game that supports only pixel shaders 3. Its like a card that supports dx10 when a game is dx11 only. Its backward compatible as well and both (ps and dx) goes along.
Dx9 games started as pixel shader 3 engines, then evolved along with engines. Current high end cards support up to pixel shaders 5.

Cuda cores/shaders engine (amd stream processors) is actually the pipelines available physically on a card (micro cores in fact) that help the main gpu core to handle calculations, either graphically, physics calculations via hardware (physx for nvidia, havoc for amd) and other operations.
Generally the higher the better; but thy get along with bus bandwidth between gpu core and memory (hence 256bit and higher is defined as high end).

In laptop high end cards like the past gen gtx for nvidia (either 2xx series or 8xxx/9xxx) can show quite an increment in those games that have an optimized driver to use all the cores dynamically based on the count of them.
Same applies to ati althought their tech is totally dynamic instead of fixed like
Nvidia.