Just discovered this excellent post all about branches on GPUs and how they're fine. THEY'RE FINE. Stop worrying about them.
https://medium.com/@jasonbooth_86226/branching-on-a-gpu-18bfc83694f2
Branching on a GPU - Jason Booth - Medium

If you consult the internet about writing a branch of a GPU, you might think they open the gates of hell and let demons in. They will say you should avoid them at all costs, and that you can avoid…

Medium

@TomF it’s… more complicated. Especially if you consider compute path instead of render.
This is another good post about IFs and branching by @BartWronski

https://bartwronski.com/2021/01/18/is-this-a-branch/

Is this a branch?

Let’s try a new format – “shorts”; small blog posts where I elaborate on ideas that I’d discuss at my twitter, but they either come back over and over, or the short form doesn’t convey all th…

Bart Wronski

@nemo @TomF @BartWronski I do love people explaining how ‘it’s more complicated than that’ TO THE MAN WHO WRITES THE ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE THAT SHADERS RUN ON.

Also Tom, don’t say you ‘discovered’ this post when you asked him to write in the first place because you didn’t want to:)

@jakesimpson @TomF @BartWronski although I don’t know the details, If I didn’t know Tom was a professional in my field, I probably wouldn’t be following them.
I appreciate when people talk from a place of specific knowledge, although this still doesn’t make my statement untrue..?
I guess what this kind of exchange is supposed to do is foster discussion (hopefully about the original topic 😉).
@nemo @jakesimpson @BartWronski It's all good - Jake just likes a bit of hyperbole and drama :-)