An Intro to Wave Intrinsics

Most graphics programmers know about the concept of a warp (or a wave in AMD parlance). It is a group of GPU threads (or lanes), typically 32, though some architectures use more, that execute the same instructions in lockstep. Maybe not all of them know about wave intrinsics, though. They are a group of special GPU instructions exposed in HLSL (and similarly in other shading languages) that a…