## F.3. Invariance Rules

For a given instantiation of an Vulkan rendering context:

Rule 1 For any given Vulkan and framebuffer state vector, and for any given Vulkan command, the resulting Vulkan and framebuffer state must be identical each time the command is executed on that initial Vulkan and framebuffer state.

Rule 2 Changes to the following state values have no side effects (the use of any other state value is not affected by the change):

Required:

- Framebuffer contents (all bitplanes)
- The color buffers enabled for writing
- Scissor parameters (other than enable)
- Writemasks (color, depth, stencil)
- Clear values (color, depth, stencil)

Strongly suggested:

- Stencil Parameters (other than enable)
- Depth test parameters (other than enable)
- Blend parameters (other than enable)
- Logical operation parameters (other than enable)
- Pixel storage state

Corollary 1 Fragment generation is invariant with respect to the state values listed in Rule 2.

Rule 3 The arithmetic of each per-fragment operation is invariant except with respect to parameters that directly control it.

Corollary 2 Images rendered into different color buffers sharing the same framebuffer, either simultaneously or separately using the same command sequence, are pixel identical.

Rule 4 The same vertex or fragment shader will produce the same result when run multiple times with the same input. The wording “the same shader” means a program object that is populated with the same SPIR-V binary, which is used to create pipelines, possibly multiple times, and which program object is then executed using the same Vulkan state vector. Invariance is relaxed for shaders with side effects, such as performing stores or atomics.

Rule 5 All fragment shaders that either conditionally or unconditionally assign `FragCoord`.z to `FragDepth` are depth-invariant with respect to each other, for those fragments where the assignment to `FragDepth` actually is done.

If a sequence of Vulkan commands specifies primitives to be rendered with shaders containing side effects (image and buffer variable stores and atomic operations), invariance rules are relaxed. In particular, rule 1, corollary 2, and rule 4 do not apply in the presence of shader side effects.

The following weaker versions of rules 1 and 4 apply to Vulkan commands involving shader side effects:

Rule 6 For any given Vulkan and framebuffer state vector, and for any given Vulkan command, the contents of any framebuffer state not directly or indirectly affected by results of shader image or buffer variable stores or atomic operations must be identical each time the command is executed on that initial Vulkan and framebuffer state.

Rule 7 The same vertex or fragment shader will produce the same result when run multiple times with the same input as long as:

- shader invocations do not use image atomic operations;
- no framebuffer memory is written to more than once by image stores, unless all such stores write the same value; and
- no shader invocation, or other operation performed to process the sequence of commands, reads memory written to by an image store.

When any sequence of Vulkan commands triggers shader invocations that perform image stores or atomic operations, and subsequent Vulkan commands read the memory written by those shader invocations, these operations must be explicitly synchronized.