This topic originated here:http://foldingforum.org/viewtopic.php?f ... 15#p150293
You don't need to worry if nvidia gpu is a little faster than ati gpu on some things or vice versa. its expected that they will perform some what differently. What we are seeing is very similar to the way that the OpenGL franchise has turned out to be - write once source code and then compile for multiple processor without changing the application code. OpenCL will likely be around for a long time to come given it is so widely supported already.bruce wrote:Our hopes for multi-gpu support depend on whether OpenCL lives up to its expectations. From what little I understand about it, at the present time, if one unit of work is presented to a nVidia GPU through CUDA, it takes, say, one unit of time. If the same unit of work is presented to an ATI GPU through Brook/CAL, it takes somewhat longer. If the same unit of work were presented to an arbitrary GPU through OpenCL, it would take much, much, much longer to process. There's no way to know when the OpenCL consortium and the manufacturers of drivers for brand-X GPUs will be able to develop code that is sufficiently optimized to be truly productive, but at present, OpenCL is more of an advertising tool than a productive computing platform.
It does worry me that some OpenCL backends will be lazily implemented, and then users of FAH blame PG instead of the hardware vendor's poor implementation. Is the state of things *that* bad?