I have been trying to use Vulkan for compute coming from a CUDA background and curious how I am suppose to set the LocalSize from Vulkan since I realize AMD Wavefronts are 64 compared to NVIDIA warps of 32
To my knowledge you can only set your LocalSize by setting it in GLSL as
layout (local_size_x = 32) in;
but I also noticed the glslang is setting WorkgroupSize on top of that to be (32, 1, 1) which according to the Vulkan spec apparently overrides the LocalSize value?
I want to be able to query my subgroup size and then set the LocalSize to be that at runtime… anyone help me with how this is possible?
“Local size” and “work group size” are different names for the same thing. The reason LocalSize and WorkgroupSize both exist is that they do different things. LocalSize/Id is how you specify the local size for the shader; WorkgroupSize decorates a global value, thus allowing your shader to read what the local size is and use that in computations.
LocalSize/Id is an execution mode, and in SPIR-V, execution mode specifiers are not results. You cannot use them as the inputs of later expressions. The WorkgroupSize is the decorator for a result <id>, so you can use it as the input for some expression.
GLSlang is not setting the WorkgroupSize to something; it is specifying that a particular result <id> shall contain the workgroup size.
If you look at it from a GLSL analogy, the SPIR-V LocalSize is like the layout(local_size_* = ##) in; declaration, while WorkgroupSize is like accessing gl_WorkGroupSize. Two different locations, but both talking about the same thing.
The names almost make it seem like they were both written by the same people 
However, that doesn’t really solve your problem. There is no way to “query my subgroup size” in Vulkan. But given such a value, you can use SPIR-V’s specialization constants to specify the value at specialization/pipeline building time. And of course, GLSL-for-Vulkan adds this feature as well.