Avoiding Branch in Shader

Depending on which platform and target hardware, it can be a good idea to eliminate branches in shader. Here's two techniques with samples.

Lerp
Lerp, a.k.a. linear interpolation, is a useful function to select between two things. If you have two vectors v1, v2 and you want to select one of them based on some condition, lerp can be used. Make sure that the result of the condition (conditionMask)  is always 0 or 1.  You can then do this:

result = lerp(v1, v2, conditionMask);

If your condition is 0, it will return v1. If your condition is 1, it will return v2.

Min/Max
Min and max is very useful in some cases. For example, let say you want to have one shader to switch between lit and not-lit. Typically, we will multiply the lighting value with color. For instance:

light = CalcLighting();
color *= light;

So, the condition would be, if there's no lighting return 1; otherwise return the lighting value. We can easily do this with Lerp.

light = lerp(1, CalcLighting(), isLit);
color *= light;

Try to convince yourself that above pseudo-code works. The question is can we do better? Yes!! Use max():

light = max(CalcLighting(), isNotLit);
color *= light;

There's some condition though. CalcLighting() should return a value between 0..1 (as it should be the case disregard hdr, intensity, etc2). Check by yourself what happens when isNotLit=0 and isNotLit=1. The advantage of this method is that it requires 1 less instruction/cycle.