Intel Preparing Sub-Group Support For Their ANV Vulkan Driver

While the Vulkan SPIR-V subgroups extensions aren't yet ready for public consumption, it looks like Intel is planning for punctually supporting the sub-groups feature within their open-source Vulkan driver.

Internally they now have Vulkan/SPIR-V sub-groups working on their driver and today published the patches in prepping the driver for these new extensions, without actually exposing the functionality yet. Among the subgroup operations expected are vote, broadcast, shuffle, quad, and arithmetic operations. The Vulkan support will likely be similar to OpenGL's ARB_shader_ballot extension.

The prep work amounts to 44 new patches while waiting for the subgroup debut once it rolls out in a future Vulkan spec revision.