Graphics-Raycast | GPUbased raycaster for Unity | GPU library

A queue is a thing that consumes and executes commands, such that each queue (theoretically) executes separately from every other queue. You can think of a queue as a mouth, with commands as food.

Queues within a queue family typically execute commands using the same underlying hardware to process them. This would be like a creature with multiple mouths but all of them connect to the same digestive tract. How much food they can eat is separate from how much food they can digest. Food eaten by one mouth may have to wait for food previously eaten by another to pass through the digestive tract.

Queues from different families may (or may not) have distinct underlying execution hardware. This would be like a creature with multiple mouths and multiple digestive tracts. If a mouth eats, that food need not wait for food from a different mouth to digest.

Of course, distinct underlying execution hardware is typically distinct for a reason. Several GPUs have specialized DMA hardware for doing copies to/from device-local memory. Such hardware will typically expose a queue family that only allows transfer operations, and those transfer operations may be restricted in their byte alignment compared to transfers done on graphics-capable queues.

Note that these are general rules. Sometimes queues within a family do execute on different hardware, and sometimes queues between families use much of the same hardware. The API and implementations don't always make this clear, so you may have to benchmark different circumstances.