An usefull cuda functionality is the possibility of use sampler (texture) direcly on linear memory without copy on an Image specific object.
The problem of 1.0 OpenCL specification is we have to :
copy buffer to an image object and after that we can use a sampler above the image.
in cuda :
we direcly construct a sampler over the buffer with user define sutrucutre (row, col pitch).
this is very useful for example when we want to use a memory segment for different image size :
we allocate for a max image size and we use for different image size without reallocation of memory.