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[ryta1203]

It's unclear to me that advantage of using UAVs over global memory, does anyone know what this might be or where I can find this information, the CAL docs are, again, very thin pickings.

[MicahVillmow]

ryta,
Global buffer is 128bit aligned addresses, UAV's are byte aligned and on 5XXX series of cards you can have up to 9 UAV's per kernel. Also through UAV's you can do byte addressable writes with the UAV arena and also atomic operations. None of these can be done on the global buffer path.

[ryta1203]

Is there a known penalty to using UAVs versus Global Memory?

In other words, is there any advantage to just using global memory directly?

[MicahVillmow]

it is easier to burst using global memory as it is an implicit 128 bit write versus an implicit 32bit write on UAV.