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What is "Work Expansion"

In a gpu-driven renderer "work expansion" is a commonly occuring problem. "Work Expansion" means that a single item of work spawns N following work items. Typically one work item will be executed by one shader thread/invocation.

An example for work expansion is gpu driven meshlet culling following mesh culling. In this example a "work item" is culling a mesh, where each mesh cull work item spawns N following meshlet cull work items.

There are many diverse cases of this problem and many solutions. Some are trivial to solve, for example, when N (how many work items are spawned) is fixed.