VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control(3) Manual Page

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2

Not ratified

This extension enables an implementation to control the subgroup size by allowing a varying subgroup size and also specifying a required subgroup size.

It extends the subgroup support in Vulkan 1.1 to allow an implementation to expose a varying subgroup size. Previously Vulkan exposed a single subgroup size per physical device, with the expectation that implementations will behave as if all subgroups have the same size. Some implementations may dispatch shaders with a varying subgroup size for different subgroups. As a result they could implicitly split a large subgroup into smaller subgroups or represent a small subgroup as a larger subgroup, some of whose invocations were inactive on launch.

To aid developers in understanding the performance characteristics of their programs, this extension exposes a minimum and maximum subgroup size that a physical device supports and a pipeline create flag to enable that pipeline to vary its subgroup size. If enabled, any SubgroupSize decorated variables in the SPIR-V shader modules provided to pipeline creation may vary between the minimum and maximum subgroup sizes.

An implementation is also optionally allowed to support specifying a required subgroup size for a given pipeline stage. Implementations advertise which stages support a required subgroup size, and any pipeline of a supported stage can be passed a VkPipelineShaderStageRequiredSubgroupSizeCreateInfoEXT structure to set the subgroup size for that shader stage of the pipeline. For compute shaders, this requires the developer to query the maxComputeWorkgroupSubgroups and ensure that:

Developers can also specify a new pipeline shader stage create flag that requires the implementation to have fully populated subgroups within local workgroups. This requires the workgroup size in the X dimension to be a multiple of the subgroup size.

Vulkan APIs in this extension are included in core Vulkan 1.3, with the EXT suffix omitted. External interactions defined by this extension, such as SPIR-V token names, retain their original names. The original Vulkan API names are still available as aliases of the core functionality.

No cross-references are available

For more information, see the Vulkan Specification

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