> Understandable, but... if a device doesn't have the uint8/uint16 extensions, then what other alternative is there?

With the devices I have at hand (Snapdragon 855/865), they support the feature shaderInt16 which allows them to use 16 bit integers in shader code. They are not able to use 16 bit buffers for input/output. Additionally, they support the extension VK_KHR_shader_float16_int8 which allows me to read 32 bit ints into 2 float16 and get better throughput. Vulkan and Android is a bit of minefield but this has been the only way I have managed to get real time performance on Android with broader support.

Originally posted by @mirsadm in #6924 (comment)