What is the "COPY" engine for? What does it do?

[HazyJ28]

Hello everyone. I upgraded to the fall creators update (WIN10 version 1709) in December and have been loving it so far, as I do video and audio engineering. (I couldn't update sooner because the update would fail, citing a "DRIVER POWER STATE FAILURE" as the reason. I sent my mobile workstation back to Acer (ACER ASPIRE VX15), and after a replacement of the motherboard, graphics card (GeForce GTX 1050 4GB), and HDD, I was good to go. No more BSOD). I noticed in WIN10 version 1709 that they added a GPU monitor in the task manager, and I have wondered ever since what the graph "COPY" was for/what it monitored. I would appreciate any insight as to what it does, as the only info I can seem to find is a random reddit post lol. Thanks in advance!

[KenjiUmino]

34 minutes ago, HazyJ28 said:

I have wondered ever since what the graph "COPY" was for/what it monitored.

i don't KNOW for sure but i ASSUME that it shows how much stuff is COPIED between video memory and system memory. i think that's what the copy engine does

[HazyJ28]

1 hour ago, KenjiUmino said:

i don't KNOW for sure but i ASSUME that it shows how much stuff is COPIED between video memory and system memory. i think that's what the copy engine does

Thank you for your response!

[flibberdipper]

Straight from the DirectX Developer Blog:

Quote

A GPU engine represents an independent unit of silicon on the GPU that can be scheduled and can operate in parallel with one another. For example, a copy engine may be used to transfer data around while a 3D engine is used for 3D rendering. While the 3D engine can also be used to move data around, simple data transfers can be offloaded to the copy engine, allowing the 3D engine to work on more complex tasks, improving overall performance. In this case both the copy engine and the 3D engine would operate in parallel.