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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

I mean, look at the performance chart. CPU mode performance is a nice J curve with respect to "realistic workloads you'd actually want to GPU accelerate." I agree that having a CPU fallback is nice, but it's also pretty much the opposite of what you'd want to do in the field.

Prediction: someone deploys this and doesn't notice it's incredibly slow for mysterious reasons, and then spends several hours to figure out that the right version of CUDA wasn't installed. ("Fail fast, fail loudly" is a nice way to ensure that doesn't happen.)

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Do you think having default notification that says "No GPU"[OK] that can be disabled or modified would be the way to solve it?

Typically you'd bubble this up as a rejected promise in JavaScript. Hopefully with a more detailed error message than "no GPU". "Failed while doing X" or "failed because of Y," where the messages contain actionable info, would be ideal. Then the application developer can decide what to do.

I've never done front end development but I would probably want to request permission to gather telemetry, and, if granted, post the telemetry and the error to an error logging service. Then you could try to diagnose aggregated issues. You could also offer the option to export the telemetry to a zip file (hopefully the same format you send it to the error logger). Then the user could examine it themselves and have the option to provide it to you via another channel (support forum, email, etc.).

>Prediction: someone deploys this and doesn't notice it's incredibly slow for mysterious reasons, and then spends several hours to figure out that the right version of CUDA wasn't installed.

Why not just print out a message "Running in CPU mode" or "Running in GPU mode". There's no reason it has to be a mystery.

The comments here tell me that programmers have a narrow idea of what other programmers should/would/could do with their software.

> I agree that having a CPU fallback is nice, but it's also pretty much the opposite of what you'd want to do in the field.

Do the opinions of potential users matter? Because most people aren't willing to waste money on unnecessary upgrades just because a developer wanted to assume everyone had mid/high-end hardware.

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