> so we’re on the hook for handling things like computing finite-difference gradients for texture sampling, interpolating attributes, and computing barycentric coordinates (either via intrinsic/SV_Barycentrics or manually).

> While we lose a bunch of work that hardware may have done for us, cutting the pipeline here

From what I’ve read, modern GPUs have moved most of this work from fixed function hardware to implicitly inserted shader assembly. So, we’re on the hook for manually writing that code. But, it’s not missing out on as much hardware magic as one might think.

If I understand correctly, there has been so much focus of cramming general compute into GPUs that the fixed function hardware for pixel work has been stripped down to visibility rasterization, barycentric generation (accessible through the SV_barycectric instruction), and texture sampling (given coordinates and derivatives).