DirectML

DirectML is Microsoft's GPU-agnostic ML acceleration API, layered on DirectX 12. It works on any Windows-supported GPU — NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, Qualcomm — without requiring CUDA or ROCm installs.

ONNX Runtime and a handful of inference engines support DirectML as a backend. Performance is generally 60–80% of vendor-native paths but installation is dramatically simpler — no driver toolkit, no version-matching pip wheels.

For local AI on Windows with a non-NVIDIA GPU (especially an Intel Arc or recent Snapdragon X laptop), DirectML is often the path of least resistance.