This, and the followup, is a presentation that I recommend as required reading to people wanting to get deeper into shader programming, not just for the knowledge but also the attitude towards shader programming (check compiler output, never assume, always profile). It has been 10 years since it was released though; in those 10 years a lot of things have changed on the GPU/shader model/shader compiler front and not all the suggestions in those presentations are still valid. So I decided to do a refresh with a modern compiler and shader model to see what still holds true and what doesn’t. I will target the RDNA 2 GPU architecture on PC using HLSL, the 6.7 shader model and the DXC compiler (using https://godbolt.org/) in this blog post.