Efficiency of CUDA vector types (float2, float3, float4)

Efficiency of CUDA vector types (float2, float3, float4)

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26676806/efficiency-of-cuda-vector-types-float2-float3-float4

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I’m expanding njuffa’s comment into a worked example. In that example, I’m simply adding two arrays in three different ways: loading the data as float, float2 or float4.

These are the timings on a GT540M and on a Kepler K20c card:

GT540M
float  - Elapsed time:  74.1 ms
float2 - Elapsed time:  61.0 ms
float4 - Elapsed time:  56.1 ms

Kepler K20c
float  - Elapsed time:  4.4 ms 
float2 - Elapsed time:  3.3 ms 
float4 - Elapsed time:  3.2 ms

As it can be seen, loading the data as float4 is the fastest approach.