Methods and apparatus are provided for analyzing impact of design rules on a layout. One exemplary method involves generating variants of the layout for different values for the rule, determining values of a device metric for each of the layout variants, and identifying the relationship between rule and the device metric based on the values for the device metric corresponding to the different values for the rule. In one embodiment, the layout variants are generated by using the different values for the rule to perform layout compaction on an initial layout generated in accordance with an initial value for the rule.