A Simple Dive Into Vulkan Compute Programming

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Simple Dive Into Vulkan Compute Programming

While Vulkan is most often talked about for being a high-performance graphics API, it also has integrated compute capabilities -- and in fact, may be the future of OpenCL -- and is quite capable for GPGPU computing. There are countless Vulkan graphics tutorials and code samples out there, but for those interested in just Vulkan for compute, a Phoronix reader pointed me to a new simple/easy project...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Vulkan-Compute-Small-Sample

[M1kkko]

Thank you, I've been waiting to see something like this since Vulkan came out.

[schmidtbag]

Though I have absolutely nothing against using Vulkan for GPGPU tasks, is there any distinct advantage of it over OpenCL? Most OCL-based tasks could operate perfectly fine on a PCIe x1 slot (and as a result, don't tend to have much CPU overhead), and I get the impression OCL isn't currently that difficult to code for.

[andrei_me]

If you check the repository, it shows how to use a compute shader in Vulkan, besides the memory part of OpenCL, which else can't be done on a compute shader that is achievable with OpenCL? That is, what features I lose choosing Vulkan Compute Shader instead of OpenCL?