Question

I know that both is on off-chip DRAM and cached.

But which is faster in access speed? Or in what circumstances one is faster than the other?

Answer 1

Texture memory is optimized for 2D spatial locality (where it gets its name from). You can kind of think of constant memory as taking advantage of temperal locality.

The benefits of texture memory over constant memory can be summarized as follows:

• Spatial locality
• The addressing calculations can be calculated outside of the kernel in the hardware
• Data can be accessed by different variables in a single operation
• 8 bit and 16 bit data can be automatically converted to floating point numbers between 0 and 1.0

See the documentation for more details.