Texture Cache Approximation on GPUs
Mark Sutherland, Joshua San Miguel, Natalie Enright Jerger · 2015
We present texture cache approximation as a method for using ex-isting hardware on GPUs to eliminate costly global memory ac-cesses. We develop a technique for using a GPU’s texture fetch units to generate approximate values, and argue that this technique is ap-plicable to a wide variety of GPU kernels. Applying texture cache approximation to an image blur kernel on an NVIDIA 780GTX, we obtain a 12 % reduction in kernel execution time while only intro-ducing 0.4 % output error in the final image. 1.