logoalt Hacker News

the__alchemistyesterday at 8:25 PM1 replyview on HN

This is at the core of the matter for me, and my knowledge is too weak to understand why this is the case. I don't enjoy the idea of relying on Nvidia's stack for GPU compute, but the alternatives I've tried (e.g. Vulkan compute) are higher friction to use. I am trying to reconcile why; Nvidia shouldn't have this moat.

My software is labeled "CPU only unless using an nVidia GPU". I would prefer to strikethrough "nVidia". Incidentally, this means no more Mac support.


Replies

swerneryesterday at 9:25 PM

Vulkan compute is not really designed or intended to be a CUDA competitor, its feature set is much more restricted, and Vulkan host side code is much more verbose than CUDA. OpenCL or SYCL are much closer in features to CUDA. I found that when using SYCL on Nvidia, debugging symbols etc can be passed through and you can use tools like NSight Compute to profile it as if it were CUDA.

show 1 reply