What about OpenCL instead of CUDA for x264?

[Deinorius]

I sometimes read about OpenCL and thought about it. It will be an open standard. Am I right, that MacOS X won't be the only OS supporting OpenCL? How about using OpenCL instead of CUDA?
Well, I know CUDA will be out earlier than OpenCL I assume. But what's you opinion?
By using CUDA there's just the way to buy a nvidia GPU. Don't like that. OpenCL seems to be more for every GPU-manufacturer.

Advantages, disadvantages?

[Inventive Software]

@x264devs: Came across this whilst looking for some info about new GPUs, would the instructions here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARB_%28GPU_assembly_language%29 be of any use? My programming knowledge isn't great, but you'd probably be able to see whether this'd help in porting the search routines et al to GPUs.

This'd make things interesting. :)

[iwod]

It is about time we show some love to the Mac users. OpenCL should give us some nice speed boost :)

[Deinorius]

But will OpenCL be just for MacOS X?

[Ronin-7]

It should be cross platform just like OpenGL, the Khronos group are managing OpenCL (http://www.khronos.org/news/press/releases/khronos_launches_heterogeneous_computing_initiative/) and all the big names are on-board, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, IBM etc.

[Deinorius]

Nvidia? Why that? What are the advantages for nvidia to support OpenCL? They have CUDA.
May be, it's a dumb question, but I'm not so much into these programming things.

[Inventive Software]

An open cross-platform standard for GPU programming is more beneficial to both NVIDIA and ATI and their clients (read developers) than CUDA and whatever ATI has at the moment.

[Sharktooth]

agreed, nvidia CUDA and ATi Stream are proprietary techs. in a world where standards are much more convenient than proprietary BS, OpenCL means all OSes and softwares can access a standard tech for accelerating complex computations without creating different code paths for different video hardware.
For example, the same reasons driven the OpenGL and DirectX (even if the latter is a proprietary standard) development...

[LoRd_MuldeR]

Yes, but I'm pretty sure Nvidia and ATI think different. They want to establish their own proprietary standards, to make people depend on their hardware. Imagine your favorite encoding application utilizes CUDA, but not Stream. Guess what your next graphics card will be: Nvidia or ATI? ^^ Also imagine a company has put a lot of effort into developing hardware-acceleration for their software via CUDA. You can be sure they'll stick to Nvidia for future hardware upgrades, instead of rewriting all the software, even if ATI will offers the better product at that time...

[Sharktooth]

True, but CUDA and Stream are too new to be affirmed standards. So, OpenCL has a great chance to make it's way into software development.

[Deinorius]

@Sharktooth
I hope so much it comes true. As we say in german: You word into God's ear.

I would like more OpenCL, which supports Windows, Linux and MacOS than a DirectX solution by M$. Guess why. :devil:
(DirectX 11 will support Compute Shaders, which seems to be, what CUDA and OpenCL are.)