Unity Game Optimization - Third Edition

Memory bandwidth

The other potential source of bottlenecks in the backend comes from memory bandwidth. memory bandwidth is consumed whenever a texture must be pulled from a section of the GPU's VRAM down into the lower memory levels. This typically happens when a texture is sampled, where a fragment shader attempts to pick the matching texture pixel (or texel) to draw for a given fragment at a given location. The GPU contains multiple cores that each have access to the same area of VRAM, but they also each contain a much smaller, local texture cache that stores the texture(s) the GPU has been most with most recently. This is similar in design with the multitude of CPU memory cache levels that allow memory transfer up and down the chain. This ...