NVIDIA Corporation
Techniques for efficiently accessing memory and avoiding unnecessary computations

Abstract:

A technique selectively avoids memory fetches for partially uniform textures in real time graphics shader programs and instead uses program paths specialized for one or more frequently occurring values. One aspect avoids memory lookups and dependent computations for partially uniform textures through use of pre-constructed coarse-grained representations called value locality maps or dirty tilemaps (DTMs). The decision to use a specialized fast path or not is made dynamically by consulting such coarse-grained dirty tilemap representations. Thread-sharing value reuse can be implemented with or instead of the DTM mechanism.