[WanderPanda]

That is a funny way to signal their commitment to HPC! But compared to other tooling (non GPU) CUDA is still really clunky. Way ahead of everything else in the GPGPU space but still surprisingly clunky. Also I don't get what they are fearing with all their "Account required for download" (e.g. for CuDNN) what are they fearing? And is it really worth the trade-off for the pain it causes for dev environments and CI pipelines? It really seems like Intel and AMD have to step in to break this monopoly to force them to improve the situation for everyone.

[jjoonathan]

No, you're not missing anything, NVIDIA's software is super clunky by the standards of most of the software world. However, for the last decade, the competition has been much worse: OpenCL development on AMD would be riddled with VRAM leaks, hard lockups, invisible limits on things like function length and registers that would cause the hard lockups when you tripped over them without any indication as to what you did wrong or how to fix it, that sort of thing. Cryptic error messages would lead to threads scattered around the internet, years old, with pleas for help and no happy endings.

The thing that caused me to ragequit the AMD ecosystem was when I took an OpenCL program I had been fighting for two days straight and ran it on my buddy's Nvidia system in hopes of getting an error message that might point me in the right direction. Instead, the program just ran, and it ran much faster, even though the nvidia card was theoretically slower.

In terms of quality, I expect the competition to catch up in a generation or two, but then there is still the decade+ of legacy code to consider. Hopefully with how fast AI/ML churns that isn't actually an insurmountable obstacle.

[versteegen]

Years ago I gave up on OpenCL (1.2 on an AMD card) because of those hard lockups, with no way to debug it. nVidia didn't even support OpenCL 1.2 (and IIRC didn't support the synchronisation primitives I wanted in CUDA either -- AMD was more capable on paper). Thanks, I feel better to hear just how bad it was -- so it wasn't just my fault for quitting.