Great points but I want to say that this is partially true. Yes you’ll see code in the shader assembly needed to sample a texture for example, but it will use i

Great points but I want to say that this is partially true. Yes you’ll see code in the shader assembly needed to sample a texture for example, but it will use instructions for vertex interpolation you just don’t have access to directly if you cut the pipeline for a visibility buffer technique. Also for barycentrics, we can query that from the hardware rasterizer, but the tradeoff there is storage. Also, if you do this in compute, unless you have access to the recently added compute derivatives, you’re still responsible for managing the bookkeeping needed to compute the finite differences. The general trend has been towards having general compute yes, but check the ISA and read your shader disassemblies before drawing any conclusions.