Huge thanks to Fabian Giesen (Mastadon: @[email protected] ) for taking the time to answer my question.
Q: I have been doing a lot of vulkan lately and I was wondering if you knew where "Image Layouts" came from? do they mean anything to the GPU or is this just something the driver takes as a hint?
A: They do mean something. It's mostly (but not exclusively) about additional metadata associated with attachments. If you have access to AMD HW console GPU docs, read up on Cmask, Fmask, Hmask, DCC. That kind of stuff. :) Often related to memory access/bandwidth optimizations that use secondary metadata elsewhere. Color compression, hierarchical Z/stencil, depth compression, multisampling optimizations, fast clears, the works.