It's always been less of a big deal than it used to be -- at least on "big" GPUs -- but the article isn't really about avoiding branches. The code presented is

It's always been less of a big deal than it used to be -- at least on "big" GPUs -- but the article isn't really about avoiding branches. The code presented is already branchless. The people giving out the advice seem to think they are avoiding branches as optimisation but their understanding of what branching code is is apparently based on if they can see some sort of conditional construct.