Texture memory faster than global memory? texture memory vs coalesced memory access

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

I’m writing a red/black Gauss Seidel FD implementation to demonstrate the use of CUDA. I’ve written both versions for texture memory and global memory (passing data to shared memory first). However even if I make use of coalesced memory accesses the texture version seems to be faster. Is there any possible explanation for this? Additionally there are not bank conflicts on shared memory accesses.

2

I’ll assume you’re getting quite a lot of cache hits (or, your entire tree fits into the 8kb texture cache) - in which case you have a lot more bandwidth using textures (due to the cache hits) than you would if you were using gmem (fully coalesced).

3

there’s also partition camping [url=“http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=96423”]The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA

4

Very interesting. I think this is not mentioned on the Cuda programming guide.