- Launch an appropriate number of invocations (next larger power of two).
32 invocations is common and the barrier is much cheaper there.
- Specialize for "needs bounds checking" vs not.
- Make the code less branchy and [[unroll]] the loops. In the final code,
I see no branches inside the main loop (only predicated stores) when
needs_bounds_check is false.
- Always sort ascending, then apply the ascending vs descending option when
doing the final stores to memory.
- Copy the values into shared memory, makes them slightly cheaper to access.