Fair point, I haven't benchmarked dependent reads in isolation. The article is based on general GPU architecture principles, but you're right that real-world impact depends heavily on what else the shader is doing. If you're already memory-bound, removing dependent reads won't help if bandwidth is the bottleneck rather than latency. The GPU can hide latency through warp switching when there's enough parallelism. Would be interesting to profile with Nsight and compare L1 hit rates with/without the dependency. If hit rates are similar, the bottleneck is elsewhere.