[badsectoracula]

I don't know how it is nowadays but i remember trying CUDA back when GeForce GTX 280 was still a high end GPU. I didn't do anything fancy, i just tried to write a simple raytracer to get a feel of how it'd work.

The experience was incredibly simple: write C like usual but annotate a few C functions with some extra keywords and compile using a custom frontend/preprocessor/whatever-nvcc-was instead of gcc (i was on Linux - and BTW i heavily contest the notion that Nvidia drivers on Linux were "nightmare", they always worked just fine with both performance and features comparable to their Windows counterparts while ATi/AMD had buggy and broken drivers for years). Again, the experience was very simple, i even just copy/pasted a bunch of existing C code i had and it worked.

Later i tried to use OpenCL which was supposedly the open alternative. That one felt way more primitive and low level, like writing shaders without the shading bits.

In a way, as you wrote, it was kinda like DirectX: that is, CUDA was like using OpenGL 1.1 with its convenient and straightforward C API and OpenCL was like using DirectX 3 with its COM infested execute buffer nonsense.

After that i never really used CUDA (or OpenCL for that matter) but it gave me the impression that Nvidia did put way more effort on developer experience.