Understanding GPU acceleration: CUDA vs. OpenCL vs. OpenGL

Are you troubleshooting what's slowing your workstation down? This article will help. Are you putting together an editing workstation? Read this article. Speed is on every editor's mind, so find out why you should care about CUDA, OpenCL and OpenGL in this article reposted from Videomaker.com. From Videomaker.com

What is CUDA? What about OpenCL and OpenGL? And why should we care? The answers to these questions are difficult to pin down — the computer-equivalent of the metaphysical unanswerables — but we’ll attempt a clear explanation.

There comes a time in a video editor’s life when they inevitably ponder the basic questions: “Is this all the speed that I have? Is there nothing more?” Like the search for the meaning of life or a grand unified theory, this simple thought launches you down an endless and infinitely deep chasm of contemplation and research, until you inevitably land on a question that you just can’t get a true answer to, and there the search stalls.

Now, we can’t help you with any grand unified theory, but we can say that the information wall you will ultimately hit on your search for video processing speed will ultimately come down to this: “What is CUDA, what is OpenCL, and why do I care?”

The truth is that in order to understand CUDA and Open GL, you’ll need to know about Open CL as well.

“Now wait”, you say. “The headline says Open GL. There must be a typo”. No, there’s just a lot of people with no sympathy for naming standards. The truth is that in order to understand CUDA and Open GL, you’ll need to know about Open CL as well. Now you could jump on the Internet and wiki all of these terms, and read all the forums, and visit the sites that maintain these standards, but you’ll still walk away confused. In this article, we’ll come to your metaphysical video conundrum rescue with as simple a language as is possible. You won’t see any circular speak about terms like “application programming interface” here! So, like all quests for answers, let’s logically start… in the middle....read more