What does unified shader core mean?
Historically, GPUs have had dedicated units for different types of operations in the rendering pipeline, such as vertex processing and pixel shading. With the unified architecture of the GeForce 8 Series, NVIDIA designed a single floating point shader core with multiple independent processors. Each of these independent processors is capable of handling any type of shading operation, including pixel shading, vertex shading, geometry shading, and physics shading. GeForce 8800 GPUs can dynamically allocate processing power depending on the workload of the application, providing unprecedented performance and efficiency.
