The NVIDIA Direct Compute programming guide lists some best practices for memory management on the GPU. One tip they give on page 8 ("Structured Buffers") is to use a 'structure of arrays' (SOA) layout rather than the typical 'array of structures' (AOS) one:
struct Particle {
float4 position;
float4 velocity;
};
RWStructuredBuffer<Particle> particles;
vs
struct Particles {
RWStructuredBuffer<float4> position;
RWStructuredBuffer<float4> velocity;
};
Particles particles;
(At least, as far as I understand)
AOS layout seems to be the most popular (maybe even only) way to manage lists of stuff in the compute shader.
I haven't found a way to implement SOA from the CPU side, Unity's ComputeShader.cs doesn't have a set struct function or similar. Does Unity expose a way to set SOA structs from the CPU side at all?
