this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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Programming

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Can anybody explain why CUDA and Rocm are necessary and why OpenCL isn't the solution? (self.programming)
submitted 4 days ago by onlinepersona to c/programming
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I've read multiple times that CUDA dominates, mostly because NVIDIA dominates. Rocm is the AMD equivalent, but OpenCL also exists. From my understanding, these are technologies used to program graphics cards - always thought that shaders were used for that.

There is a huge gap in my knowledge and understanding about this, so I'd appreciate somebody laying this out for me. I could ask an LLM and be misguided, but I'd rather not 🤣

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[–] Kissaki 28 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

ROCm is an implementation/superset of OpenCL.

ROCm ships its installable client driver (ICD) loader and an OpenCL implementation bundled together. As of January 2022, ROCm 4.5.2 ships OpenCL 2.2

Shaders are computational visual [post-]processing - think pixel position based adjustments to rendering.

OpenCL and CUDA are computation frameworks where you can use the GPU for other processing than rendering. You can use it for more general computing.

nVidia has always been focusing on proprietary technology. Introduce a technology, and try to make it a closed market, where people are forced to buy and use nVidia for it. AMD has always been supporting and developing open standards as a counterplay to that.