Performance difference in OpenGL compute shader vs Vulkan Compute Shader vs Cuda/OpenCL and others I have been told there is no performance difference if you are skilled enough when it comes to gpu computing. And cuda only performs better because nvidia wants it to. I have also read graphic api's compute shaders are not as good as OpenCL/cuda. I don't understand how are compute shader different from Cuda/OpenCL and why would they be slow (if they are). I wanted to know this because OpenCL is difficult to understand and setup for me. Will there be a performance hit on using OpenGL compute shader and will Vulkan compute shader perform better than OpenGL's?
In general, you should not see significant performance differences running identical compute shaders via one API vs. another; in the end they’re running the same instructions on the same hardware. It’s possible for vendor-provided toolkits like CUDA or MetalPerformanceShaders to have more efficient implementations of a given algorithm on that vendor’s hardware than a more generic version of the algorithm, because they’ve been designed and tuned for the strengths of that hardware, but there’s nothing in principle that would prevent you from developing the same efficiencies on your own with enough optimization work.
Long story short: work with whichever API you find easiest to use, and invest some time in learning how to profile and tune your code for the hardware you plan to run it on.