To answer your questions by parts: Shaders: the shader compiler does go to great lengths to avoid register bank conflicts of all kinds. Hardware: you generall

To answer your questions by parts: Shaders: the shader compiler does go to great lengths to avoid register bank conflicts of all kinds. Hardware: you generally don't want to have that much complexity in a GPU pipeline, especially not in the front end -- these are very simply machines, no OpO execution, very little prediction, and so their power comes from width, not depth. If you make each core a little more complex, you lose out because you now need to spend area that would have otherwise been spent on more compute units.