Great stuff. I find it really funny that a big feature of modern API’s is that applications place barriers instead of being handled by the driver, and we all tried it for a while and then threw up our hands and decided to write graph systems to automatically place them because it was too hard.

As a graphics programmer in the games industry, it’s always exciting to me when people discover how much fun all this stuff is

Also if you branch on a GPU, the compiler has to reserve enough registers to walk through both branches (handwavey), which means lower occupancy.

Often you have no choice, or removing the branch leaves you with just as much code so it’s irrelevant. But sometimes it matters. If you know that a particular draw call will always use one side of the branch but not the other, a typical optimization is to compile a separate version of the shader that removes the unused branch and saves on registers

RenderDoc is made by one person. It’s used by every graphics programmer. It’s free, open source, faster + better than anything else. I love it.