Nvidia Dual Copy Engines

[Chris Lux]

Very interesting read:
http://www.nvidia.com/docs/IO/40049/...py_engines.pdf

Good to finally get high performance asynchronous data streaming to and from device memory.

But, the thing that annoys me is the note on page 14: "Having two separate threads running on a Quadro graphics card with the consumer NVIDIA® Fermi architecture or running on older generations of graphics cards the data transfers will be serialized resulting in a drop in performance."

Why in hell not enable it for consumer products (if, and i may be wrong here, the hardware feature is present on all high end Fermi chips)? Texture streaming is extremely important there to. I am working in a scientific visualization context and we do have access to Quadro Boards, but we can not afford these a lot cards for every workstation where we develop and demonstrate large volume and image rendering software. The Fermi Quadro boards currently are extremely expensive, so access to them is almost impossible to us.

The data transport to the GPU is almost always the main bottleneck for us, so the decision to cut this feature (next to quad buffer stereo) is very sad. And i can imagine that D3D, at least for some games, will make use of the extra copy engines... So D3D gets stereo rendering (ok, i know no QBS, but still) and the other cool GPU features.

Sorry, but i get mad at such decisions.
-chris

[mfort]

Thanks for sharing the link. I was waiting to this paper for some time.

Actually, I am quite disappointed about their approach. I'd like to be able to use one opengl context/thread and still use both copy engines. I would rather see some solution allowing us to issue memory transfer(s) and gfx commands from the same context and still have it running in parallel. This solution would help everyone without making any changes in the code.

Making OpenGL context just for memory transfer is strange. This looks like workaround for me. Especially when PBOs are designed to be asynchronous. I understand the issue with one thread. It would break in-order pipeline execution. Maybe something like DirectX command buffers can make it better.

[oscarbg]

Also being this a Nvidia specific optimization would'n be better to use CUDA OpenGL interop and use two streams using async memcpies from/to pinned mem so we would make use of two copy engines with only one OGL context?
I have not thinked throughly about that but that should work..
even better this would work also in Teslas which by the way are more economical..
This of course would not work with AMD cards and code from whiteppaper although complex optimization for a simple problem works on AMD also..
But wait OCL supports OGL interop and even I think dual dma copy is usable from OpenCL world but I can't be sure as I don't own a Quadro/Tesla to test..
So best solution seems to use OCL OGL interop that should provide two benefits:
better:
*one OGL context.
*works on tesla line also
equal:
*works on AMD also
worse:
*have to manage OCL context

Perhaps there could be some problems due to "hard" synchronization between OCL/OGL interop but I think with not yet implemented ocl 1.1 and ogl 4.1 advanced OGL/OCL interop should fix al possible issues..
What do you think?
Can someone at Nvidia speak about my reasoning?

[Dark Photon]

But, the thing that annoys me is the note on page 14: "Having two separate threads running on a Quadro graphics card with the consumer NVIDIA® Fermi architecture or running on older generations of graphics cards the data transfers will be serialized resulting in a drop in performance."

Why in hell not enable it for consumer products (if, and i may be wrong here, the hardware feature is present on all high end Fermi chips)? Texture streaming is extremely important there to. I am working in a scientific visualization context and we do have access to Quadro Boards, but we can not afford these a lot cards for every workstation where we develop and demonstrate large volume and image rendering software. The Fermi Quadro boards currently are extremely expensive, so access to them is almost impossible to us.

Seconded, and for exactly the same reason.

Beyond this, a high-end consumer Fermi (GTX480) being out-benched by 2.6X by a last-gen card (GTX285) with data transfers is embarrassing (Re: slow transfer speed on fermi cards). At least make it as good as the last-gen boards.

[Bruce Wheaton]

Quadro card with consumer Fermi? That's an odd modifier - so there's Quadro cards and *Quadro* cards?

And we have to guess which it is?

Bruce

[Dark Photon]

Quadro card with consumer Fermi? That's an odd modifier - so there's Quadro cards and *Quadro* cards?

And we have to guess which it is?

Bruce

By "high-end consumer Fermi" I meant high-end "consumer GPU" (i.e. GeForce, as opposed to their "professional GPU" line: Quadro) with a chipset based on the "Fermi" chip line.

They do have professional line (Quadro) Fermi-based GPU, but I wasn't referring to them.

And as for guessing, while they do tell you on the NVidia pages what is "Fermi"-based, for more detail search the web. Reviews/wikipedia/etc. GFxxx chipset codenames are Fermi.

[Chris Lux]

He was referring to the original Nvidia statement in my initial post, where they differentiate Fermi Quadros and consumer Fermi Quadros.

[Dark Photon]

Ah, yeah. That is confusing.