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This looks great - I've been looking for a sustainable, cross-platform-and-vendor GPU compute solution, and the alternatives are not really great. CUDA is nvidi

This looks great - I've been looking for a sustainable, cross-platform-and-vendor GPU compute solution, and the alternatives are not really great. CUDA is nvidia only, Metal is apple only, etc etc. OpenCL has been the closest match but it seems like it's on the way out. Does anyone have real world experience using Vulkan compute shaders versus, say, OpenCL? Does Kompute make things as straightforward as it seems?

cherryteastain 2y ago
Check out SYCL
exDM69 2y ago
I've done some compute shaders with Vulkan (and a lot of graphics shaders). It's quite nice and simple, after you have gone through the initial hurdle of setting it up (or used a helper library to do it for you). For compute shaders in particular you should enable buffer device addresses, shader subgroups and timeline semaphores (need to be explicitly enabled at init). The downside of compute shaders, regardless of graphics API (gl, dx, vk), is that they have an unspecified time limit after which the OS will kill your process. There are ways to disable this in your OS/GPU configuration but there isn't a portable way of doing this programmatically from your code. Another issue is that if you use the same GPU for compute (or heavy graphics tasks) as your display output, your desktop responsiveness may go down. I had some issue where my desktop got really sluggish when I was drawing some graphics that took 350ms per frame (laptop integrated graphics).
zozbot234 2y ago
> OpenCL has been the closest match but it seems like it's on the way out. SYCL is the unofficial successor to OpenCL - in that SYCL implementations like OpenCL are based on SPIR-V compute 'kernels'. (Note that these are not directly compatible with SPIR-V compute 'shaders' as found in Vulkan, so implementing OpenCL or SYCL on top of the Vulkan compute facilities comes with some challenges.)

cherryteastain 2y ago

Check out SYCL

exDM69 2y ago

I've done some compute shaders with Vulkan (and a lot of graphics shaders). It's quite nice and simple, after you have gone through the initial hurdle of setting it up (or used a helper library to do it for you). For compute shaders in particular you should enable buffer device addresses, shader subgroups and timeline semaphores (need to be explicitly enabled at init). The downside of compute shaders, regardless of graphics API (gl, dx, vk), is that they have an unspecified time limit after which the OS will kill your process. There are ways to disable this in your OS/GPU configuration but there isn't a portable way of doing this programmatically from your code. Another issue is that if you use the same GPU for compute (or heavy graphics tasks) as your display output, your desktop responsiveness may go down. I had some issue where my desktop got really sluggish when I was drawing some graphics that took 350ms per frame (laptop integrated graphics).

zozbot234 2y ago

> OpenCL has been the closest match but it seems like it's on the way out. SYCL is the unofficial successor to OpenCL - in that SYCL implementations like OpenCL are based on SPIR-V compute 'kernels'. (Note that these are not directly compatible with SPIR-V compute 'shaders' as found in Vulkan, so implementing OpenCL or SYCL on top of the Vulkan compute facilities comes with some challenges.)