[bruce343434]

In my experience fiddling with compute shaders a long time ago, cuda and rocm and opencv are way too much hassle to set up. Usually it takes a few hours to get the toolkits and SDK up and running that is, if you CAN get it up and running. The dependencies are way too big as well, cuda is 11gb??? Either way, just use Vulkan. Vulkan "just works" and doesn't lock you into Nvidia/amd.

[cmovq]

Vulkan is a pain for different reasons. Easier to install sure, but you need a few hundred lines of code to set up shader compilation and resources, and you’ll need extensions to deal with GPU addresses like you can with CUDA.

[rdevilla]

Ah yes, but those hundred lines of code are basically free to produce now with LLMs...

[cylemons]

Whatabout the extensions? is it widely supported

[NekkoDroid]

That is always one check away: https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listextensions.php

[cylemons]

VK_KHR_buffer_device_address has 91.3% support

and

VK_KHR_variable_pointers has 98.66% support

looks good to me

[Arech]

Haha. People have already said what is Vulkan in practice - it's very convoluted low-level API, in which you have to write pretty complicated 200+LoC just to have simplest stuff running. Also doing compute on NVIDIA in Vulkan is fun if you believe the specs word for word. If you don't, you switch a purely compute pipeline into a graphical mode with a window and a swapchain, and instantly get roughly +20% of performance out of that. I don't know if this was a bug or an intended behavior (to protect CUDA), but this how it was a couple years ago.

[Almondsetat]

On Windows: download a 3GB exe and install

On Linux: add repository and install cuda-toolkit

Does that take a few hours?