I plan on working on two projects and don't know what the best way to go about it is.

One project would be to do a particle simulation on the gpu, the other a raytracer on a volume of data, of course all in the gpu.

I'm not at all familiar with Cuda or OpenCL other then they are good for this type of work.

What I would like to know is if Cuda or OpenCL is better then just using rendered to textures, why are they better?

Are they faster in some way? Easier to work with? What are the pro's and con's?

Thanks

If you want a basic rundown of how CUDA compares to OpenCL and vice versa, read this: http://streamcomputing.eu/blog/2010-04-22/difference-between-cuda-and-opencl/

I myself am just getting started learning CUDA. Currently, I'm reading the book known as "CUDA C by Example". Like MJP already stated, it's very much like C and I haven't used OpenCL yet either.

I'd say they are both a bit overkill for a simple particle engine (unless you're massively drawing and updating millions of particles like rain or snow). I've seen raytracing done using shaders many times before, so it depends on what scale you're doing it on, I guess. Like I said, I'm still learning this myself. ^^

Shogun.

For a raytracer, you probably won't need to interact with a D3D/GL context so CUDA and CL might make more sense.

Is this because everything could be done in CUDA or CL including the visualization?

Thanks to your reply's I'll be looking into compute shaders and drawIndirect, I know next to nothing about these.

If there are any good resources on these I would be really interested in them.

Also, the title to this post feels awkward, but I couldn't come up with anything better. Is there a better way to phrase it?