CUDA 5.0 back

(L) [2012/10/16] [ost by toxie] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

out now: [LINK http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-downloads]

(L) [2012/10/16] [ost by spectral] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

Thanks Toxie,

But it sounds that there is no more OpenCL support in this SDK. I have try the Visual Profiler and it does not detect OpenCL.
I have contact NVidia and they tell that it is normal that OpenCL is not supported !

(L) [2012/10/17] [ost by toxie] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

Indeed OpenCL is not really the major focus anymore, but rather CUDA and OpenGL (4.3) compute shaders..

(L) [2012/10/17] [ost by spectral] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

>> toxie wrote:Indeed OpenCL is not really the major focus anymore, but rather CUDA and OpenGL (4.3) compute shaders..
It seems.. I understand for CUDA but I don't understand why OpenGL contains compute shader now... is there some advantages over CUDA or OpenCL !
Or it is just yet another 'level' over open gl ?

(L) [2012/10/17] [ost by graphicsMan] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

From what I could tell, it allows low-overhead scheduling of the shader in the same GL context.  That means that it may be possible to avoid driver context switches if you want to do lightweight compute during graphics intensive work.

(L) [2012/10/18] [ost by Dade] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

>> toxie wrote:Indeed OpenCL is not really the major focus anymore, but rather CUDA and OpenGL (4.3) compute shaders..
Sorry, does this mean NVIDIA is not going to support OpenCL any more ?

(L) [2012/10/18] [ost by spectral] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

>> Dade wrote:toxie wrote:Indeed OpenCL is not really the major focus anymore, but rather CUDA and OpenGL (4.3) compute shaders..
Sorry, does this mean NVIDIA is not going to support OpenCL any more ?

I'm not sure... and honestly it is not a good strategy to sell their hardware. Developers are still able to use some API to use either CUDA or OpenCL for their application (Just an API and a few #define in the kernels), it is not really difficult. What they will do is simply force peoples to use softwares that does not support NVidia hardware ! And with low OpenCL support we will have poor OpenCL software on NVidia !

BTW, here is the answer I have got from NVidia about the non support of OpenCL in 5.0 toolkit :
 >>
Thanks for contacting Nvidia!

This is by design. The visual profiler (and the new nvprof profiler) do not support OpenCL in the 5.0 toolkit. You can use the visual profiler from the 4.2 toolkit to get OpenCL support. Sorry for any inconvenience!

I'm still thinking that it will be better for NVidia to provide a very good support for OpenCL, this way users will prefer using NVidia GPUs if they performs better (It is my case now). But we need a debugger and a profiler.

Just my advice.

(L) [2012/10/18] [ost by toxie] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

>> Dade wrote:toxie wrote:Indeed OpenCL is not really the major focus anymore, but rather CUDA and OpenGL (4.3) compute shaders..
Sorry, does this mean NVIDIA is not going to support OpenCL any more ?
I don't think so, it's still supported, but i would say that the focus is on supporting mainly CUDA and GL compute..

(L) [2012/10/19] [ost by spectral] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

Here is another reply form NVidia that confirm what Toxie wrote :
 >>
Now we are focusing our efforts on CUDA at this point, this bug is not fixed in this release and will be evaluated for the next.

Today CUDA 5.0 is very efficient and is very convenient to use. A customer will get immediate support when using CUDA. If CUDA is an option for you, it will be a good choice.

(L) [2012/10/19] [ost by Dade] [CUDA 5.0] Wayback!

BTW, AMD has recently released CODE XL : a good CPU and OpenCL profiler/debugger. I have done some test and it is a quite useful tool (when it doesn't crash ... it happens often on my Linux box).