&gt; is the vendor lockin not a problem?<p>It so happened that almost nobody in the (previously tiny) industry specialized for using GPU cards for computation had used any cards other than NVIDIA early on. NVIDIA had listened to that niche market by releasing increasingly performant hardware for compute needs, while other manufacturers kept ignoring the niche and focusing on graphics. As a result, very few on the software side have a burning desire to do free work to support cards made by anyone other than the Big Green, even if they had equivalent performance (they likely don&#x27;t).<p>This may seems strange to web devs who remember the hard-fought war against Microsoft&#x27;s lock-in on the Internet via IE. But NVIDIA is seen in a different light---it is seen as a benevolent company without which the GPU-for-compute platform wouldn&#x27;t even exist.