Convenience of 2D CUDA texture memory against global memory

[alrikai]

@JFSebastian

But I have a concern when you mention “random access”. Why do you think that in this case texture memory will be faster? In the case of “random” access, I would conclude that neither global nor texture momory will exploit any cache. Am I right?

Yes, and since the global memory cache has higher throughput than texture memory cache, if neither get any use out of their respective caches, then their relative speeds should be the same. If anything, since texture memory has 2D caching locality, it might have better cache hit rates than global memory for random accesses; that is, the texture caching scheme can be more forgiving for access patterns that don’t follow global memory coalescing requirements.