PCIe rebar currently uses system RAM to VRAM communication. 3dvcache to VRAM via DMA could be made possible without even accessing RAM, this would completely eliminate 50+ ns of RAM access latency (of course the necessary data needs to be already available in 3dvcache from system RAM before any of this fancy stuff happens).
I seriously dubt that main memory latency and bandwidth is the performance bottleneck for many games. Even for loading it wouldn’t be particularly useful compared to storing the game in RAM because now you’d be limited by PCIe bandwidth. Maybe with horribly optimized games that do a lot of random random reads during load it would help, but that’s pushing it. Now the GPU side on the other hand could be interesting.
What use cases would this be good for?
Game Dev in 2047: “why don’t I just decompress all these textures I won’t use for a while here”
PCIe rebar currently uses system RAM to VRAM communication. 3dvcache to VRAM via DMA could be made possible without even accessing RAM, this would completely eliminate 50+ ns of RAM access latency (of course the necessary data needs to be already available in 3dvcache from system RAM before any of this fancy stuff happens).
Yes
Your entire game could be in the next floor up from the CPU cores, instead of in a metaphorical different city.
Reminds me of RAM drives, but people mostly moved on from that since SSDs have gotten so incredibly fast and cheap in the past couple of years.
Looking at Star Citizen install size now I just need a 14-socket motherboard
I seriously dubt that main memory latency and bandwidth is the performance bottleneck for many games. Even for loading it wouldn’t be particularly useful compared to storing the game in RAM because now you’d be limited by PCIe bandwidth. Maybe with horribly optimized games that do a lot of random random reads during load it would help, but that’s pushing it. Now the GPU side on the other hand could be interesting.
What. No.