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Do you think that Vulkan, which also provides a compute API, and appears to be gaining rapid momentum, might solve some of these issues?
by vegabook 10y ago
Do you think that Vulkan, which also provides a compute API, and appears to be gaining rapid momentum, might solve some of these issues?
- fulafel 10y agoVulkan's SPIR-V might turn out to be a good common target eventually. There's potential but it's all in the execution, is it going to be good enough on majority of platforms? Then there's Apple who are anti-Vulkan so there goes one major platform. It's also possible that everyone ends up implementing CUDA (AMD, Google, OTOY, PGI have impls out or underway) and it'll get supported as a codegen target.
- Athas 10y agoOpenCL is fine, but not well supported (because NVIDIA). Vulkan is also fine, so again, the only question is support. I don't know whether Vulkan can supplant OpenCL for computation, or whether it's even supposed to. None of these solve the problem that the underlying drivers are still terrible (when I test Futhark code I routinely have to restart our GPU servers, as the NVIDIA kernel module crashes). Hopefully, the smaller surface area of OpenCL and Vulkan compared to OpenGL will eventually result in better drivers. I am also very hopeful about AMDs switch to an open source driver model.