# MSI GTX 950 2GD5T triangles per second

A friend got an MSI GTX 950 2GD5T graphics card for xmas.

I said "yeah, graphics cards are super fast now, that thing probably processes 2 billion triangles per second". Then I tried to look it up to check if that was even in the right ballpark, but I was unable to find a "triangles per second" stat for that card, and actually for many cards.

Is "triangles per second" even a meaningful stat? If so, what is the approximate number for this card? (given otherwise average conditions)

• 'Processes' is very vague. Is that vertex shader ops? Raterizer? Shading? All of the above? None of these are meaningful, because they have a massive scene dependence. FLOPS is kind of better, but still not great because it doesnt take into account register pressure, memory latency, etc. Dec 28, 2015 at 16:52
• I understand that there are all of these factors. Nonetheless, I'd be interested to know about how many triangles per second can be drawn assuming modest/reasonable/typical choices for the various factors (simple/default vertex and pixel shaders, simple lighting, big model being textured by some reasonable texture sheets). Dec 29, 2015 at 18:32

In my tests a GTX 1050 can do ~1B triangles with glDrawElementsInstanced(GL_TRIANGLES, .... That's roughly 2/3 of chip clock. Arguably GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP can give you an x3 speed boost, but e.g. idtech4 only supports GL_TRIANGLES.