3 ms·
This may be a reference to texture streaming. While I've never developed for consoles, I do know that texture streaming on desktop & mobile can be challenging.
by Mr_P 7y ago
This may be a reference to texture streaming. While I've never developed for consoles, I do know that texture streaming on desktop & mobile can be challenging.
Being able to mmap a texture directly from ssd (as if it were RAM), with the hardware & os taking care of all the details, could be a big deal for developers.
Edit: To get a sense of how challenging this can be, see this recent talk from GDC for texture streaming in Titanfall 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BuvKotqpWo . Literally all of this complexity would go away if you could mmap textures directly from disk and let the gpu handle it.
- fwip 7y agoTo my ears, this sounds very similar to what AMD's "Vega" cards provided for high-end compute. The "High Bandwidth Cache Controller" allows datasets outside of the GPU's memory to be accessed in a transparent way. I can't find a decent technical article at the moment, but here's a link to the "Radeon SSG," a $7k graphics card that ships with 2TB of solid-state storage attached, designed to be used to process absolutely massive datasets as though they were in RAM: https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon-pro-ssg https://www.amd.com/en/products/professional-graphics/radeon...
- hybrids 7y agoSounds similar to NVIDIA's GPU Direct RDMA in principle. https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect https://developer.nvidia.com/gpudirect