ipKonfig has posted some benchmarks of the new ATI 9700 Pro
For starters, 8 parallel rendering pipelines. Now since you asked, we'll explain this a little. First, the 8 parallel rendering pipelines are combined with 4 parallel geometry engines, providing faster 3D gaming performance. Comparing this to the ATI Radeon 8500, which has 4 parallel rendering pipelines, the Radeon 9700 more than doubles its pixel pipeline throughput to 19.4Gb/s. That's quite a bump.Read more
Imagine trying to get thousands of people to travel into a football stadium to watch their teams duke it out. Now, one single line is going to be very slow, as the ticketer only receives one ticket per person through one gate. Now, upgrade this slow football stadium with 8 gates, with a ticketer at each gate. The frustration of all the fans is massively reduced by allowing them to get their money's worth watching the game rather than shuffling in line. (If only bank managers and tellers understood this!)
Rendering is a process in which the abstract description of a scene is converted to an image. With this comes much computation and transmission demand, and the rendering process becomes a very pressurized and constraining process for the graphics card. 8 parallel rending pipeline process increases frames per second greatly, but making games more life-like does come at a dollar cost. Price becomes a greater factor; upgrading that football stadium entrance does cost, ya know.
