A small thread to discuss gpu optimization both nv, amd and even intel. Not a who's better thread - its obviously intel who wins. How could we optimize rendering / storing / overall performance of GPU's.
For a start I would like to recap all nice optimizations that maxwell brought. The technology packed into those cards was enormous. NV has created natively processed optimizations which are/were game changer even though they lack the horsepower of AMD.
The biggest optimization that maxwell natively supports is Tile-based Rasterization
This optimizations gives a lot of head room against unoptimized game api code and amd cards.
You are getting massive gains in performance, memory taken, but if someone had keen eyes they would've seen that there's some trick involved. Still its optimization worth existing, and losses are too small to even care about them.
(this is also one of the reasons, why maxwell gpu's handled tessellation so much better than Kepler cards - while they were pretty much the same thing.)
You can read about maxwell's optimizations here (its tile-based rasterization)
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/232771-targeted-testing-reveals-secrets-of-nvidia-maxwell-pascal-power-efficiency
The latest optimizations i have noticed was while I was testing my friends 1060 in my server rig. I had games running on same machine and same monitor. I compared it side by side to my fury-x, and 780 to notice something very interesting.
I think its the newest optimization by NV, or maybe its something that was done, and hidden away long time ago.
The colors on 1060 in games seemed washed out, (i don't mean literally, but dark areas were shades of gray "black" rather than just simple black/dark. Same amounted to other colors (please note i tested this rendering it at 4k and up-scaling it to 8k to really notice the difference in color palette. The Pascal was rendering a lot less colors. (thanks to my research of SDR and HDR i became quite familiar with the idea) i thought it was something up with my setup, but i couldn't find anything, anything at all that could've cause it on my side. My whole view was confirmed as i watched rx480 vs 1060 in bf1 in dx12
and thats not all of it if we divide screen even further we can notice that there's even less colors on the edges of screen.
The question remains how much performance would that actually give? If you would cut off colors and replace them as same - by making dynamic range smaller than it should be - rendering effectively less bits.
(I don't have maxwell card to compare but i think it may have same optimizations or at least similar to pascal in color palette)
So yeah I would love to hear your opinions, ideas on improving performance, tricks in hardware/programming. What they should do etc. How much we would gain from such.
