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Deleted member 13524
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The GK107 "Mini-Kepler" has been taking design wins on laptops by storm, since its performance/power consumption is really great.
However, most of these laptop models (and actually the only desktop implementation so far) come with DDR3 memory @ 1600MHz using a 128bit bus.
This results in 28.8GB/s total bandwidth, which is a bit suffocating for a GPU with a performance-per-clock equivalent to AMD's Juniper (800sp, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs).
I have one of those in my laptop, and for its 1366*768 resolution, the sub-par memory bandwidth doesn't make that much of a difference.
Plugging it to a 1080p TV, it's a different story. I've tried overclocking the memory to ~2200MHz, increasing the bandwidth to ~35GB/s, and the performance bump is almost linear with the bandwidth increase (not a surprise, I know).
That said, I also found out that most of these Mini-Kepler GPUs are coming with Ivy Bridge systems and PCI-Express 3.0 connections.
Now, a PCI-Express 3.0 16x link does a maximum of 16GB/s. Adding those bandwidths up would result in almost 45GB/s, which is a solid 55% increase in memory bandwidth.
And even if the PCI-Express link could only be used at half its theoretical speed, we'd still have some 27% bandwidth increase.
So why isn't nVidia implementing Turbocache for this GPU? Could it be implemented with a simple driver update?
I know this would introduce lots and lots of horrible latencies, but couldn't the driver "choose" to only load assets that are less latency-sensitive through the PCI-Express bus?
However, most of these laptop models (and actually the only desktop implementation so far) come with DDR3 memory @ 1600MHz using a 128bit bus.
This results in 28.8GB/s total bandwidth, which is a bit suffocating for a GPU with a performance-per-clock equivalent to AMD's Juniper (800sp, 32 TMUs, 16 ROPs).
I have one of those in my laptop, and for its 1366*768 resolution, the sub-par memory bandwidth doesn't make that much of a difference.
Plugging it to a 1080p TV, it's a different story. I've tried overclocking the memory to ~2200MHz, increasing the bandwidth to ~35GB/s, and the performance bump is almost linear with the bandwidth increase (not a surprise, I know).
That said, I also found out that most of these Mini-Kepler GPUs are coming with Ivy Bridge systems and PCI-Express 3.0 connections.
Now, a PCI-Express 3.0 16x link does a maximum of 16GB/s. Adding those bandwidths up would result in almost 45GB/s, which is a solid 55% increase in memory bandwidth.
And even if the PCI-Express link could only be used at half its theoretical speed, we'd still have some 27% bandwidth increase.
So why isn't nVidia implementing Turbocache for this GPU? Could it be implemented with a simple driver update?
I know this would introduce lots and lots of horrible latencies, but couldn't the driver "choose" to only load assets that are less latency-sensitive through the PCI-Express bus?