Luser error

So it turns out the main problem with the performance issues in my last post wasn't the cache being overloaded after all ... but the compiler running out of registers to unroll a couple of nested loops I asked it to.

It turns out because of a cut and paste job I left in some test code which was limiting the register count for the compiler, and the register spillage was a bit of a disaster and causing the order of magnitude drop. With this fixed things look a lot more promising, although at ~4ms it is still a little slower than I would like and I can't see much being able to be done to improve it.

It's a bit weird that an unconstrained compile for a specific device would choose to use all registers it needs for the code-unrolling, ignoring the device specifics, but I guess this is some particular of the nvidia opencl implementation.

There is still some problems with the texture cache being hit too hard anyway - the integral image has to be stored using the UINT32 data type, and it needs at least 8 lookups per feature tested which is a pretty heavy load to start with. With the other feature tester I could just use 8 bit images which fits better into the cache it seems (contrary to what i'd believed until this point).

Investigations ongoing ...