Im my brief play with using GPU graphics for compute (e.g. render to texture) vs specialized compute on GPU was that the latter required tweaking, but was still slower.
My sense is that paralelization still isn't solved in general, so (a bit like NP "reduction") if you can't cast your problem in terms of an "embarrassingly parallelizable" (ep) case like rendering, it's not going to be very fast. Plus, the rendering pipeline has had all hell optimized out of it.
Put another way: what features could a GPU general language have that are ep, but with no equivalent available in GPU graphics languages?
I think there are some trivial ones, e.g. older openGL ES (mobile) don't have render-to-float-texture - a crucial and ep feature for general compute.
My sense is that paralelization still isn't solved in general, so (a bit like NP "reduction") if you can't cast your problem in terms of an "embarrassingly parallelizable" (ep) case like rendering, it's not going to be very fast. Plus, the rendering pipeline has had all hell optimized out of it.
Put another way: what features could a GPU general language have that are ep, but with no equivalent available in GPU graphics languages?
I think there are some trivial ones, e.g. older openGL ES (mobile) don't have render-to-float-texture - a crucial and ep feature for general compute.