Matt Soos writes that the speed advantages that developers enjoy from AMD’s OpenCL comes at the expense of an implementation that is rather painful to deal with.
The OpenCL architecture is clean, usable and user-friendly. Unfortunately, the current AMD OpenCL implementation is bad. I hope this will improve in the future, and as more and more people start using it, the bugs will eventually be reported, tiraged, and fixed. As the number of people that buy a particular card for its OpenCL capabilities increase, for instance because games start using OpenCL as a way to speed up certain physics calculations, the makers of these cards will eventually be forced to fix the bugs and make the development easier. Until then, we might have to keep on suffering for the speedups we get.
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