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Comment by lostmsu | Hacker News Reader

This works on DX12. There's another more mature project, that uses CUDA/OpenCL, and has CPU-only mode too: http://www.ilgpu.net/

Frankly, unless licensing is a problem, I think ComputeSharp author should just implement a DX12-based accelerator for ILGPU.

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To me ComputeSharp looks a lot more accessible. I could understand how to use it instantly from the readme file. While I've gone over the documentation for ilgpu now and it mostly raises more questions.

Looks like ComputeSharp is at a higher level of abstraction, or closer to what I expect with my background.

Anyway its definitely a valuable project and I'd love to give it a run.

Ouch... that's very sad to hear :( ILGPU was developed with Cuda/OpenCL/C++ AMP (designed for GPGPU computing) in mind. Do you have any suggestions for us to improve the documentation?

I think the fact that it runs on dx12 is very cool, because it could potentially allow me to run gpgpu stuff on a laptop with only integrated graphics. Does anyone have any sense of whether or not that would be worthwhile? Is the parallel efficiency of an integrated gpu worthwhile to develop for?

If your algorithm is well parallelized, sure! Even a mobile GPU would likely be much faster in things such as image processing or other general purpose shaders than trying to run those on the CPU (which especially on mobile is likely not to be very performant).

If you wanted to try, you can clone the repository (make sure to be in the dev branch!) and then run the Benchmark project, which will show you some baseline difference in speed between the CPU and the GPU for some example algorithms. Let me know how it goes!

Thanks for the reply! I will check this out. My potential use case is actually audio processing, I’ll let you know how it goes!

Awesome! If you find any particular problems feel free to open an issue on the repo (or ping me in the C# Discord server). Do make sure to grab one of the latest ComputeSharp 2.0 packages from the CI though and not the ones on NuGet, those are still with the old 1.x version, I plan to update them in the coming weeks! Also remember to have a look at the various samples in the repo if you want some general reference as to what kind of operations can be done with the library. Cheers!

I thought most audio DSP/VSTs don't use GPGPU because of the latency. It is rare CUDA or similar is required, if ever.

Intel and AMD integrated graphic support OpenCL, meaning ILGPU will work on your laptop.

CUDA is NVidia vendor lock-in. While not a bad things intrinsically, it does limit possibilities for a general purpose. With this one, you can just plug whatever GPU that supports DX12 into your hardware and start creating "incoming blockchain miners written in C# in ..3..2..1"

But why is ILGPU a problem then? ILGPU is CUDA + OpenCL. OpenCL should be fine, right?

And DX12 is Microsoft vendor lock-in. To make a portable GPGPU app I'll have to use ILGPU. The only platform DX12 covers, that ILGPU does not is XBox.

ILGPU provides both Linux and MacOS.

ComputeSharp can run code on the CPU as well, through the DX12 WARP device (https://docs.microsoft.com/windows/win32/direct3darticles/di...). It's obviously not super performant compared to properly optimized code for the GPU, but it offers an easy to use fallback solution for devices that don't have a compatible GPU at least. ComputeSharp will just automatically pick that device if it can't find a suitable GPU to use, and it's also possible to just explicitly use that one instead if eg. you wanted to run some tests or something else.

The CPU part I mentioned is mostly a side thought. Risking being incorrect here, but I thought with ILGPU using CPU device means you can use .NET debugger to debug your code, which is a huge advantage.

ILGPU's main brilliancy though is support for most interesting platforms: Windows, Linux, MacOS, and maybe even Android (via opencl). Also, hopefully, Nvidia-based IoT boards (via CUDA and OCL).

DX12 coverage is way less, and only really brings XBox to the table.

I am not saying your project is bad. It is also brilliant! I would love to work on it too, if days had just over 32-36 hours instead of 24 :-) But as a consumer of .NET open source package ecosystem, it would be MUCH better not to write GPGPU code twice using one library first for Mac, Linux and Android, and then again using another library for XBox (either works on Windows).

So I am asking you to be open minded here and seriously consider joining ILGPU project.

P.S. personally, I found ILGPU a few months ago, and I am in no way part of the project (yet).

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