Back in 2014 or so I made the unfortunate mistake of buying AMD cards with the thought that I'd just use OpenCL. I knew that some codes wouldn't run, but I had

Back in 2014 or so I made the unfortunate mistake of buying AMD cards with the thought that I'd just use OpenCL. I knew that some codes wouldn't run, but I had catalogued the ones I really cared about and thought I was up for the challenge. I was so, so wrong. First of all, software that advertised OpenCL or AMD compatibility often worked poorly or not at all in that mode. Adobe creative suite just rendered solid black outputs whenever acceleration was enabled and forums revealed that it had been that way for years and nobody cared to fix it. Blender supported OpenCL for a while, but it was slower than CPU rendering and for a sticky reason (nvidia did the work to support big kernels with heavy branching and AMD didn't). Ironically, OpenCL mode had decent performance but only if you used it on an nvidia card. The situation was even worse in scientific codes, where "OpenCL version" typically meant "a half-finished blob of code that was abandoned before ever becoming functional, let alone anywhere near feature-parity." I quickly learned why this was the case: the OpenCL tooling and drivers weren't just a little behind their CUDA counterparts in terms of features, they were almost unusably bad. For instance, the OpenCL drivers didn't do memory (or other context object?) cleanup, so if your program was less than perfect you would be headed for a hard crash every few runs. Debugging never worked -- hard crashes all around. Basic examples didn't compile, documentation was scattered, and at the end of the day, it was also leagues behind CUDA in terms of features. After months of putting up with this, I finally bit the bullet, sold my AMD card, bought an NVidia card, ate the spread, the shipping, the eBay fees, and the green tax itself. It hurt, but it meant I was able to start shipping code. I'm a stubborn bastard so I didn't learn my lesson and repeated this process two years later on the next generation of cards. The second time, the lesson stuck.