> couldn't

More like wouldn't* most of the time.

Well isn't that the case with a few other things? FSR4 on older cards is one example right now. AMD still won't officially support it. I think they will though. Too much negativity around it. Half the posts on r/AMD are people complaining about it.

The lack of CUDA support on AMD is absolutely not that AMD "couldn't" (although I certainly won't deny that their software has generally been lacking), it's clearly a strategic decision.

Supporting CUDA on AMD would only build a bigger moat for NVidia; there's no reason to cede the entire GPU programming environment to a competitor and indeed, this was a good gamble; as time goes on CUDA has become less and less essential or relevant.

Also, if you want a practical path towards drop-in replacing CUDA, you want ZLUDA; this project is interesting and kind of cool but the limitation to a C subset and no replacement libraries (BLAS, DNN, etc.) makes it not particularly useful in comparison.

Many projects turned out to be far better than proprietary because open-source doesn't have to please shareholders.

What sucks is that such projects at some point become too big, and make so much noise forcing big techs to buy them and everybody gets fuck all.

All it requires to beat proprietary walled garden, is somebody with knowledge and a will to make things happen. Linus with git and Linux is the perfect example of it.

Fun fact, BitKeeper said fuck you to the Linux community in 2005, Linus created git within 10 days.

BitKeeper make their code opensource in 2016 but by them, nobody knew who they were lol

So give it time :)

We have HIP at home.