I worked at one of the first companies to ship a program with OpenGL ARB Fragment Shaders, so yeah, we traded developer time for customer performance. Managing

I worked at one of the first companies to ship a program with OpenGL ARB Fragment Shaders, so yeah, we traded developer time for customer performance. Managing the code was an utter nightmare, and we developed a ton of custom tools to try to tame that beast. If we'd had something like LLVM available at the time, it would have been a godsend. And yes, getting performance out of the video card was left up to us, and that was a beast. I'd think the single most important factor would be the data you had, and the operations you needed to perform on them. If your business logic was amenable to FPGA, then it might make sense...