There are many ways to measure graphic hardware performance, but the two most easily available and well documented metrics are texel fill rate and bandwidth. While both of these measurements are not as relevant as they used to be, they never the less continue to be a significant representation of performance progress. So I compiled a few numbers based on the Radeon series of graphic cards and have my Excel sheet kicks out the following two graphs.
In 2005 we had graphics hardware doing about 8 Giga Texel/sec. 2008 we have top line dual core ATI doing about 64 GT/sec, eight fold increase. If future developments hug the trend line well, by 2012 texel fill rate should be in the 150GT/sec range, roughly 19 times 2005 hardware.
Any one working for ATI or NVidia can tell me if this is about right or overly optimistic?
