Gadgetory

hey everyone we're at the nvidia suite at CES 2019 and i'm joined again by Justin Walker a 10 video we spoke previously at the Germany event yes we did for the taurine unveil this time the topic is it's it's kind of going back to that the unveil of torreón but we didn't really get into more of the information on floating point versus integer and how that pipeline has shifted a bit with the new architecture before that this video is brought to you by the deep cool captain 240 pro AO cooler the captain 240 pro uses a bladder within the water tank to expand and contract based on liquid temperature as a leak prevention mechanism this works by birthing air at higher temperatures making for a unique closed-loop liquid cooler design the captain 240 pro also expands upon the existing captain series by extending tube length for more flexible positioning and updating the LEDs learn more at the link in the description below so if you missed our initial coverage we did do a bit of a deep dive on the turn architecture but it's been a little while so let's let's kind of recap it sure why why are we even talking about floating point vs. integer or actually we should probably just do a really quick elevator pitch of what is that as we're talking instruction types I guess ultimately right but so so a top-level recap you know floating point rows integer sure so floating Porter integer is just two different numerical formats right I mean the the GPU is essentially just doing mouth and the and floating-point are integer to different numerical formats that you can input into the GPU to do that math and to help calculate you know the right the right color values and qualities for the pixels and depending on the workload you're doing you could be using integer you could be using floating point right and floating point you'll hear like FP 60 and IP 32 stuff like that that's right my hair referred to a single or double or half precision that's correct so you get a number of decimal points depending on what kind of floating-point precision you're dealing with and with the integer I guess it's it's more or less a whole number yes like 1 1 or 2 or whatever right an example on the interface of a game where you might see integer in speaking with some developers of some strategy games I've learned that resource count for example might be used where you never have anything except whole number it's it's pushed off to the cpu typically in those games but GPU at least with Tori now there is more ability to work with integer so yeah with Pascal how did it work your pleasure with Pascal are our execution cores could flip between either floating-point or integer so if you have a floating-point instructions you run it as floating-point if an integer instruction comes along you stop running the floating-point and you start running the energy right so is that is that effectively an interrupt it's just what you just swap between the between the two right and floating-point has been you know traditionally in the past flow an important specifically epi32 has been you know the common format and so that's why that's why Pascal actually most of it was you know back in the day Mo's it was just floating all right but you know with more modern and complex games you get more and more of the integer math and with Turing we updated the the architecture to be able to process that integer and floating point math in parallel right so then to that point what is an example of when you encounter integer because floating point for sure is is is it safe to say it's the most most common of the two games for games right so when do you encounter integer so generally speaking as the game gets more and more complex and you're trying to do more more complex things in the shaders you'll hit more integer math and more specifically a lot of times compute when you're running the more complex compute shaders they'll tend to generate much more integer math okay so uh games that would do that and there's a Stein there yeah there's a bunch of examples of it I you know Wolfenstein 2 is one that does a ton of integer math Call of Duty Battlefront 2 shadow of war just a few you know a lot of the the some of the more modern titles that are doing more complex work and more complex compute workloads to use a more integer math okay so then in torreón when you get an integer instruction as opposed to Pascal and what's what is ultimately the this sort of not necessarily a firm number what's what sort of performance difference are you looking at though um it can be very it can be fairly significant right you take let's take Wolfenstein as an example you know an average there's maybe 20 or 30 percent of the work of the instruction sets alright okay and on Pascal for any of those imagers we'd stop doing the FB 32 and we do the integer math okay and then you'd flip back to epi 32 right on Turing you can just run both of those concurrently so if thirty percent of the instructions are integer we don't have to stop doing any of the floating-point calculations we have separate hardware that will just run through that integer math right in parallel right and that's dedicated hardware and that's dedicated okay so then in theoretical scenarios you have maybe a 100 percent integer or 107 floating-point scenario and it's just doing only floating point that integer Hardware I guess it's just idle like it's if it's only floating-point yeah yeah you're just using the floating-point hardware okay so then in a jury instruction comes down the pipe and it just pushed off - yeah you have a separate X if you have a separate execution course to run the integer math is that also the the floating point versus integer units I guess is that all in the SMS like it's within the same block yes that's all it's all within the SM it's all about it's all within the the general computing cores okay and we can find a block diagram to and prevent screen for reference okay so we have some good examples of games that would use compute workloads things like that I mean this might be a game developer question so feel free to push it off to them but are there any firm examples you can give of like a certain type of computation or visual effects or like in game as a player of the game is there anything I can look at regularly and say that's integer yeah that's you're not really gonna be able to that happens it's such a deep level in the engine you're never you know it's not something you're gonna go see on the screen right more of kind of a deeper level implementation sure and I mean the reason the reason we see it of course is cuz we we we have to analyze all right yeah we have analyzed all the workloads coming in from the game so we can we can see this trend of more and more integer normal requirements for integer math right and of course that's what for the decision to have separate execution units in turn is this is this typically something that's is it happening more on an engine level like as engines developers there's more trends towards integer or individual developers it's a tan engine as well I mean it can happen to both levels it's more just a it happens to be an efficient way to do the things that the game developers are trying to do sure and it's just a way to optimize and the things that the game developers you're trying to do so what kind of gets implemented down from there and and again this is this is probably like in epic games or one of those engine developer questions but my understanding is that in a lot of instances the game programmer it's making the game not the engine programmer the game programmer just sort of it builds what they want and then lets venj and figure out what's going on yeah I mean that'd be great question for from how I understand it that's generally the way they would think about it so I'm just gonna do what I what I want to do to make the effect look good and make the game look good and kind of let the let the lower level systems and they in the end I gotta figure out how to how'd it do the math filter it right yeah okay cool so yeah we'll put will have some block diagrams in here you can look at and we do have a deep dive talking about the torreón architecture when it first was discussed in germany so if you want to check that out it's come on sold we have it on the channel Justin thank you for joining me sure thing appreciate the interview no problem we'll see you all next time