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What will happen when shaders meet textures?

Started by BlueWanderer Apr 24, 2012 at 6:29 PM 2 replies 1k views
Original Post
BlueWanderer
BlueWanderer
As it seems to me, when there are around one thousand shader units, we can only expect around one hundred or less texture units. So when the shaders are sampling textures, will they be stalled?
MJP
MJP
In general, the thread with the texture fetch will stall while it waits for the fetch to complete. However a GPU will keep many many threads in flight simultaneously, and will typically have another warp/wavefront of threads that it can swap out so that execution can continue. Read through this for more details.
Hornsj3
Hornsj3
I would have answered "total particle reversal", but your answer seems correct too.
BlueWanderer
BlueWanderer
Let's put it another way. My card has 16 x 9 SIMD units and 4 x 9 texture mapping units (and I wonder if the 2 "x 9"s have same meaning). Can I say that one SIMD group have 4 texture mapping units? If so, when the group is executing one sampling instruction, how the texture mapping units are used? If not, how will they do the job?

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