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i swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things
by mathisfun123 3d ago
i swear people who are outsiders here have only clickbait takes; if you've never had to ship GPU code professionally you should just not comment on these things.
the source language has never been the moat. Nvidia sells to hyperscalers. Hyperscalers have armies of kernel authors who have no issue translating shaders by hand (or now with claude). Nvidia's moat is (and will remain for the foreseeable future) the entire stack. you cannot fathom the pain and misery of working on literally any other stack. if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf you really have no idea what you're talking about.
- swerner 3d agoIf that is your standard, I do have an idea what I’m talking about.
- mathisfun123 3d agoYa? do tell us about your experience that leads you to believe mere translation is the bottleneck in the market...
- swerner 3d agoI’m too old to participate in internet pissing contests.
- mathisfun123 3d agothis isn't a "pissing contest"? you made a speculative claim in a public forum and i'm challenging your authority to make such a claim. a "pissing contest" would be if i had said i've shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of shader code into prod and thus you clearly have no idea what you're talking about because you haven't (which is also true).
- swerner 3d agoI could post the GitHub URLs of all the shader code I wrote that’s running on countless GPUs right now, but what would it change? I’m still just a random guy on the internet with an opinion that happens to be different from your opinion. You can simply disagree with me, regardless of my experience (or lack thereof).
- mathisfun123 3d ago> You can simply disagree with me that's exactly what i did and made an argument for why i think you're wrong. in response you provided exactly zero substantive remarks other than "i've written shaders" and then accused me of pissing. also FYI it's clear from your profile that you've only worked on graphics (embree, blender, etc) and not compute. so i'll repeat: you're an outsider and you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
- swerner 3d agoOutsider to what?
- mathisfun123 3d agoto the domain you presume to have authority to comment on
- swerner 3d agoWhat domain do you think I was talking about?
- swerner 3d agoIf it helps you at all: “if you've never debugged a GPU synchronization error or kernel panic due to some GPU firmware bug or fought absolute shit profilers hunting for perf” I have done all of those things. As part of my full time job, for years. Now that we’ve put all of that aside, can we stop talking about me and go back to discussing moats? What do you think are top three things that are holding customers back from buying AMD GPUs instead of Nvidia GPUs? I could be misremembering, but I think Jensen Huang himself once called CUDA or the CUDA ecosystem their moat, and it certainly seems to be accepted narrative in the tech press. They may be wrong there, and you sharing your first hand experience here would be helpful to many of us readers here.
- swerner 3d agoMost modern graphics is compute. Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, etc do not use Vulkan to render their movies. It’s CPUs or CUDA. “graphics people do not (and cannot) write CUDA kernels/shaders” is just not true at all. All it would take to verify that would be things like reading the introduction of the OptiX documentation, a small sample of SIGGRAPH GPU papers or the Blender/Cycles source code.