Fill rate is a commonly used quantifier for computer graphics cards. It is measured in one of two quantities, either
pixels/sec or
texels/sec. According to
Tom's Hardware, a texel is equal to 480 pixels, and is a term
invented by
3dfx to sell
Voodoo graphics cards.
Fill rate becomes useful because graphics cards vary greatly in their rendering power, the most important difference being the number of rendering pipelines. A card with two rendering pipelines clocked at 200 MHz will have a fill rate almost exactly identical to a card with four rendering pipelines clocked at 100 MHz.
Most cards available today have fill rates in the 100s of Mtexels. The Geforce2 GTS claims a maximum fill rate of 1.6 GTexels, though the actual throughput is much lower, due to slow DRAM.