3 ms·

What if the GPU had its own private SSD with textures installed to it when you install the game? A 100GB SSD is about 20% of the price of a high end video card.

by Hondor 10y ago

dogma1138 10y ago
Inb4 the next GTX titan comes with 24GB of HBM and an M.2 slot. I don't think it's necessary for applications that require so much memory you can probably develop some proprietary tech to access storage (NVIDIA does it). JC isn't talking about compute tho, he's talking about gaming he really likes megatextures but he's in a minority and I honestly can't claim to have enough expertise to judge if he's right or not. GPU memory management is a mixed bag there are many cards with different speed of RAM, different bandwidths all doing the magic voodoo in the background regarding low level memory access and compression way beyond what you are exposed to on the driver and API layers (e.g. NVIDIA's incard memory compression which is enabled regardless of how you compress or load your textures in the first place). WDDM allows lower end system to take advantage of more video memory to improve performance in less demanding applications which are most apps today while still enabling all the nice graphics we come to expect from out window manager and applications. I'm not sure if allowing the GPU to read directly from the SSD or RAM (outside of the current scope of virtualized GPU memory and asset loading) has actually enough benefit to justify both the engineering costs and the potential security pitfall that can happen when you run multiple applications that all of a sudden get DMA access to your RAM and local storage. This is more so the case for gaming considering the amount of RAM that graphic cards come with today and this is only increasing I don't know if anyone but JC actually wants/needs this. I am wondering how do consoles handle it, IIRC from playing a bit with the UDK (UE3) at the time I recall that it supported streaming textures directly from the optical media on the Xbox 360, so if anyone knows how it works under the hood and is willing to share I think it would add to this topic.
CyberDildonics 10y ago
That could happen with Intel's optane SSDs but I don't think it is necessary. The latency between the CPU and GPU is not measured in any sort of human perceivable time, so it doesn't matter unless the GPU is making millions of cpu memory accesses, and that isn't how games or GPUs work for obvious reasons. The bandwidth is also not a problem, the entire memory of a 16GB GPU can be filled in under a second.
- dogma1138 10y ago
  The latency between the GPU and CPU is a very big problem for gaming, if it wasn't we weren't be having this discussion a bad CPU call can easily add 50MS of latency to your frame which makes you all of a sudden drop from 60fps to 20.
  - CyberDildonics 10y ago
    You are talking about two different things. One is the latency of data from main memory to the gpu memory and the other is whatever video game metric you are using.
    - dogma1138 10y ago
      No, they are effectively the same thing. To get 60fps your video card needs to push out a frame every 16ms. If say 6ms of this is actual in card processing and 10ms is CPU/API overhead and you add to it another CPU call + system memory access that adds 30-35MS latency you are now operating at ~50ms per frame which means that you can only output 20 frames each second.

What if the GPU had its own private SSD with textures installed to it when you install the game? A 100GB SSD is about 20% of the price of a high end video card.

by Hondor 10y ago

What if the GPU had its own private SSD with textures installed to it when you install the game? A 100GB SSD is about 20% of the price of a high end video card.

dogma1138 10y ago

Inb4 the next GTX titan comes with 24GB of HBM and an M.2 slot. I don't think it's necessary for applications that require so much memory you can probably develop some proprietary tech to access storage (NVIDIA does it). JC isn't talking about compute tho, he's talking about gaming he really likes megatextures but he's in a minority and I honestly can't claim to have enough expertise to judge if he's right or not. GPU memory management is a mixed bag there are many cards with different speed of RAM, different bandwidths all doing the magic voodoo in the background regarding low level memory access and compression way beyond what you are exposed to on the driver and API layers (e.g. NVIDIA's incard memory compression which is enabled regardless of how you compress or load your textures in the first place). WDDM allows lower end system to take advantage of more video memory to improve performance in less demanding applications which are most apps today while still enabling all the nice graphics we come to expect from out window manager and applications. I'm not sure if allowing the GPU to read directly from the SSD or RAM (outside of the current scope of virtualized GPU memory and asset loading) has actually enough benefit to justify both the engineering costs and the potential security pitfall that can happen when you run multiple applications that all of a sudden get DMA access to your RAM and local storage. This is more so the case for gaming considering the amount of RAM that graphic cards come with today and this is only increasing I don't know if anyone but JC actually wants/needs this. I am wondering how do consoles handle it, IIRC from playing a bit with the UDK (UE3) at the time I recall that it supported streaming textures directly from the optical media on the Xbox 360, so if anyone knows how it works under the hood and is willing to share I think it would add to this topic.

CyberDildonics 10y ago

That could happen with Intel's optane SSDs but I don't think it is necessary. The latency between the CPU and GPU is not measured in any sort of human perceivable time, so it doesn't matter unless the GPU is making millions of cpu memory accesses, and that isn't how games or GPUs work for obvious reasons. The bandwidth is also not a problem, the entire memory of a 16GB GPU can be filled in under a second.

dogma1138 10y ago
The latency between the GPU and CPU is a very big problem for gaming, if it wasn't we weren't be having this discussion a bad CPU call can easily add 50MS of latency to your frame which makes you all of a sudden drop from 60fps to 20.
- CyberDildonics 10y ago
  You are talking about two different things. One is the latency of data from main memory to the gpu memory and the other is whatever video game metric you are using.
  - dogma1138 10y ago
    No, they are effectively the same thing. To get 60fps your video card needs to push out a frame every 16ms. If say 6ms of this is actual in card processing and 10ms is CPU/API overhead and you add to it another CPU call + system memory access that adds 30-35MS latency you are now operating at ~50ms per frame which means that you can only output 20 frames each second.