Thanks for the link, it looks interesting. My reluctance in learning CUDA (aside from the time investment in learning, which I'm happy to believe isn't actually too bad) is that the lower-level I have to work at, the less time I'd be able to spend writing "useful code" and the less flexibility I'd have in future if I'd want to move to something non-Nvidia.
I'm sure many other people are in the same position. I don't mind sacrificing a little performance for a much easier programming environment.
Learning CUDA is very much doable, if you're already a competent programmer you'll be up and running in a relatively short time. The biggest hurdle will be to gain sufficient insight into the intricacies of memory management and how to squeeze maximum performance out of your hardware, but if you're satisfied with just a sizeable bump then it should be easy enough.
If you want to go all out you can probably get to the required level of knowledge based on a few weeks to a few months of really hard work depending on where you are coming from in terms of experience.
The docs are excellent, there are tons of examples and google will usually turn up a solution to a problem in case you hit a snag.
