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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

Man, it was just GPU for a while. But same boat. I regret not getting the 4090 for $1600 direct from Nvidia. "That's too much for a video card", and got the 4080 instead. I dread the day when I need to replace it.

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The Radeon RX 9070 XT performs at a similar level to the RTX 5070, and is retailing around $600 right now.

No CUDA means not an option for me.

What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA?

> What kinds of applications do you use that require CUDA?

Molecular dynamics simulations, and related structural bio tasks.

Is the CUDA compat layer AMD has that transparently compiled existing CUDA just fine insufficient somehow or buggy somehow? Or are you just stuck in the mindshare game and haven’t reevaluate whether the AMD situation has changed this year?

I haven't checkout out AMD's transparency layer and know nothing about it. I tried to get vkFFT working in addition to cuFFT for a specific computation, but can't get it working right; crickets on the GH issue I posted.

I use Vulkan for graphics, but Vulkan compute is a mess.

I'm not in a mindshare, and this isn't a political thing. I am just trying to get the job done, and have observed that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.

I didn’t talk about Vulkan compute.

> have observed that no alternative has stepped up to nvidia's CUDA from a usability perspective.

I’m saying this is a mindshare thing if you haven’t evaluated ROCm / HIP. HIPify can convert CUDA source to HIP automatically and HIP is very similar syntax to CUDA.

TY; will check those out.

There's also ZLUDA, which can run llama.cpp and some other CUDA workloads already without any modification, but it's still maturing.

Unfortunately, AMD drivers are beyond terrible and you'll experience frequent timeouts.

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