Ask Slashdot: What Is the Most Painless Intro To GPU Programming?

dryriver writes "I am an intermediate-level programmer who works mostly in C# NET. I have a couple of image/video processing algorithms that are highly parallelizable — running them on a GPU instead of a CPU should result in a considerable speedup (anywhere from 10x times to perhaps 30x or 40x times speedup, depending on the quality of the implementation). Now here is my question: What, currently, is the most painless way to start playing with GPU programming? Do I have to learn CUDA/OpenCL — which seems a daunting task to me — or is there a simpler way? Perhaps a Visual Programming Language or 'VPL' that lets you connect boxes/nodes and access the GPU very simply? I should mention that I am on Windows, and that the GPU computing prototypes I want to build should be able to run on Windows. Surely there must a be a 'relatively painless' way out there, with which one can begin to learn how to harness the GPU?"

Comments

Learn OpenCL

[Tough Love]

Since the whole point of GPU programming is efficiency, don't even think about VBing it. Or Pythoning it. Or whatever layer of a shiny crap might seem superficially appealing to you.

Learn OpenCL and do the job properly.

Re:Learn OpenCL

[HaZardman27]

That's because the closest analogy to a software engineer using a more abstracted language in the hardware world is the packaging of common circuitry. Or when hardware engineers design chips, do they actually model out the components of every single transistor?