its proberbly an error in the ATi site, yea i thought it has 16. Does the term ROP's or were you see 16 ROP's mean 16 pipelines?
It's possible it could be confused. They're pretty closely related. The Render or Raster Output Unit, is one of the final steps in the rendering process. The pixel pipelines take texel and pixel information and process it into a final pixel or depth value. The ROPs perform the transactions between the relevant buffers in the local memory, including writing or reading values and also blending them together. Generally cards used to have the same number of ROP's, texture units, shaders, and often pipelines. But today most cards have more of the above then they do ROP's but not always. I find it all pretty confusing.
Higher resolution just makes things look smoother, IE less jaggies and less necessity (if any) to use anti aliasing. If you play at 800x600 (which i've done on small monitors) simply bump up the AA and the game will look fine. Fear just doesn't look as good as it does with all the eye candy up when you turn things down. But other games are fine.
I will admit that does come into play, I did sort of forget that factor when I posted that remark. I'm used to playing at low res but bumping it up does make a difference no doubt. Good call dude. Some game's however react differently, Riddick looked the same pretty much regardless of what res I played at. But unreal Tournament or FarCry look conciderably less jaggy and more clean now that I think of it. Depends on the content of the image really. Stuff like telephone wires and fences look pretty terrible unless you jack up the AA or crank the res, usually both. But indoor areas with a lot of amorphous shapes and organic material often looks pretty good on most settings. Doom 3 for instance.
GTA SA is the worst looking, everywere you look there is loads of jaggy lines, also you get this wierd stuff around trees, and you cant even stop all the rubbish in gta sa. Unreal Tournament needs all settings to max to look good, well UT2K4 does anyway.
Yeah GTA SA is definatley not the most next gen game out there. But concidering it's console origins and Rockstars focus on other things besides graphics it's understandable. But lets just hope GTA IV raises the bar. It's supposed to use a modified engine of the one they used in their Table Tennis game. That sounds really weird but the character models in that game are nothing short of awesome. Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis for Xbox 360 - Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis Xbox360 Game - Rockstar Games presents Table Tennis Xbox 360 Video Game
Definately, it won't be immediately but Rockstar would never abandon the PC user base. So it looks like the 360 and PS3 will get it in early 2007 and a few months later PC users ought to have it as the case has been in the past.