microZEUS
The whole stack, hand-drawn.

◄ Wiki / Graphics

subgroup quad

A subgroup operation restricted to a 2x2 block of neighbouring pixels.

When a GPU shades pixels, it processes them in 2x2 quads so it can compare adjacent pixels — for example to estimate how fast a texture coordinate changes. Quad subgroup operations let the four threads in that block exchange values directly. This is how shaders compute derivatives and pick texture detail levels.

See also

  • subgroupA small hardware bundle of shader threads on a GPU that all run in lockstep together.
  • texture samplingReading a smoothly-interpolated colour from a texture image inside a shader.
  • texel / texelFetchA texel is one pixel of a texture; texelFetch grabs exactly that pixel with no smoothing.

Referenced by

subgroup