Some of the mistakes/confusion being pointed out in the article is being replicated here, it seems.
The article is not claiming that conditional branches are free. In fact, the article is not making any point about the performance cost of branching code, as far as I can tell.
The article is pointing out that conditional logic in the form presented does not get compiled into conditionally branching code.
And that people should not continue to propagate the harmful advice to cover up every conditional thing in sight[0].
Finally, on actually branching code: that branching code is more complicated to execute is self-evident. There are no free branches. Avoiding branches is likely (within reason) to make any code run faster. Luckily[1], the original code was already branchless. As always, there is no universal metric to say whether optimisation is worthwhile.
[0] the "in sight" is important -- there's no interest in the generated code, just in the source code not appearing to include conditional anythings.
[1] No luck involved, of course ... (I assume people wrote to IQ to suggest apparently glaringly obvious (and wrong) improvements to their shader code, lol)
The article is not claiming that conditional branches are free. In fact, the article is not making any point about the performance cost of branching code, as far as I can tell.
The article is pointing out that conditional logic in the form presented does not get compiled into conditionally branching code. And that people should not continue to propagate the harmful advice to cover up every conditional thing in sight[0].
Finally, on actually branching code: that branching code is more complicated to execute is self-evident. There are no free branches. Avoiding branches is likely (within reason) to make any code run faster. Luckily[1], the original code was already branchless. As always, there is no universal metric to say whether optimisation is worthwhile.
[0] the "in sight" is important -- there's no interest in the generated code, just in the source code not appearing to include conditional anythings.
[1] No luck involved, of course ... (I assume people wrote to IQ to suggest apparently glaringly obvious (and wrong) improvements to their shader code, lol)