I figured I’d test out the CUDA 2 release for OS X, see what it was capable of, all that. As far as I’m aware my iMac with its 8800GS should be supported, at least partially. Alas, while the SDK & toolkit are somewhat simple to install, none of the apps run out of the box because the libcudart.dylib is installed in a weird place (/usr/local/CUDA/lib/) and requires setting DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH to even get them going. But even once you do, they all seem to fail. Most just say “FAILED” and quit. Some, like the ‘marchingCubes’ demo, just hang the machine, requiring a hard reset. Awesome.
The only ‘support’ link I could find in all the documentation, what little they provide, goes to a forum which contains only two posts, only one of which has any substance which is a release announcement for CUDA v1 for Windows and Linux. Awesome.
So, needless to say, my opinion of it right now is pretty low. I eventually found an email address that looked likely enough – cuda@nvidia.com – and will await their response to my problem reports. Hopefully they can resolve the issues and I’ll actually be able to get into it a bit.
Failing that though, I’ve realised that via the goodness of NV extensions I should in fact be able to write geometry shaders for my 8800GS [without having to wait for OpenGL 3], which makes me all giddy and warm inside, so, if nothing else I’ll have a go at that sometime. Germs still awaits. :)
