[zozbot234]

Are GPU's really easier to program than scalar w/ SIMD (or vector insns)? The programming models you have to work with for GPGPU seem quite obscure, whereas with CPU and SIMD flipping a compiler switch gets you most of the way there, and self-contained intrinsics do the rest.

[TinkersW]

GPU programming is easy enough, the complexity comes from the seperate memory system and the tedious(and not portable) API you need to use to access the GPU.

I prefer intrinsics as they give more control than shader languages and they can be written in C++ instead of fiddling with some garbage GPU API that runs async.

[pjmlp]

MSL, CUDA and SYSCL are C++ with extra topping.

Also one of the reasons CUDA won developer love is that it fully embraced polyglot programming on the GPU.

[TinkersW]

None of those are both portable and widely available on end user machines, which is needed for games

CUDA seems nice, but being Nvidia only makes it a total dead end.

[slavik81]

Disclaimer: I work on AMD ROCm, but my opinions are my own.

There's also HIP[1], which can be used as a thin wrapper around CUDA, or with the ROCm backend on AMD platforms. It doesn't yet match CUDA in either breadth of features or maturity, but it's getting closer every day.

[1]: https://github.com/ROCm-Developer-Tools/HIP

[gnufx]

As I understand it, that has to work for the CORAL 2 US "exascale", so people who've been proved fairly right so far obviously have some confidence in it. (de Supinksi of Livermore said he'd be out of a job if conventional wisdom was right, though it was pretty obvious at the time that it wasn't.) Free software too, praise be.

[TinkersW]

It looks good but without Intel iGPU support I don't think any gamedevs would use it :/

I wish all the GPU companies would get together and make a standard based on C++ and stick with it.

[kmbriedis]

I believe the ML community will strongly disagree. CUDA is everything

[ethelward]

Because the academic ML community does not care about shipping product to end users not equipped in nVidia.

[pjmlp]

Except SYSCL also works on AMD and Intel, and also has a CUDA backend, but apparently you missed that part.

In what concerns commercial uses of CUDA, Hollywood doesn't seem to have any problem with it, nor the car manufacturers with Jetson.

[pjmlp]

Windows and iOS gaming community with disagree will that statement.

Or are you speaking about the 1% Linux users on Steam?