Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) have become one of the most attractive platforms in exploiting high thread level parallelism with the support of new programming tools such as CUDA and OpenCL. Recent GPUs has applied cache hierarchy to support irregular memory access patterns; however, L1 data cache (L1D) exhibits poor efficiency in the GPU. This paper shows that the L1D does not always positively affect the applications in terms of performance and energy efficiency for the GPU. The performance of the GPU is even harmed by using the L1D for lots of applications. Our proposed technique exploits the characteristics of the currently-executed applications to predict the performance impact of the L1D on the GPU and then decides whether to continuously use the cache for the application or not. Our experimental results show that the proposed technique improves the GPU performance by 9.4% and saves up to 52.1% of the power consumption in the L1D.