I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics programming since I do think it would be fun to build a game engine, but I will admit that even getting started with the low level Vulkan stuff is still scary to me.
I think what I want is something like how SDL does 2D graphics, but for 3D. My understanding is that for 3D in SDL you just drop into OpenGL or something, which isn't quite what I want.
Maybe WebGPU would be something I could have fun working on.
SDL 3.0 introduced their GPU API a year or so ago, which is an abstraction layer on top of vulkan/others, might want to check it out.
Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine.
However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL GPU code, such as their approach to synchronization, which was a pattern that solved a lot of problems for me in my Vulkan engine, and made things a lot easier/nicer to work with.
I'm working with SDL GPU now, and while it's nice, it hasn't quite cracked the cross platform nut yet. You still need to maintain and load platform-specific shaders for each incompatible ecosystem, or you need a set of "source of truth" HLSL shaders that your build system processes into platform-specific shaders, through a set of disparate tools that you have to download from all over the place, that really should be one tool. I have high hopes for SDL_shadercross to one day become that tool.
SDL GPU is extremely disappointing in that it follows the Vulkan 1.0 model of static pipelines and rigid workflows. Using Vulkan 1.3 with a few extensions is actually far more ergonomic beyond a basic "Hello, World" than using SDL GPU.
`wgpu` in Rust is an excellent middle ground, matching the abstraction level of WebGPU. More capable than OpenGL, but you don’t have to deal with things like resource barriers and layout transitions.
The reason you don’t is that it does an amount of bookkeeping for you at runtime, only supports using a single, general queue per device, and several other limitations that only matter when you want to max out the capabilities of the hardware.
Vulkan is miserable, but several things are improved by using a few extensions supported by almost all relevant vendors. The misery mostly pays off, but there are a couple of cases where the API asks you for a lot of detail which all major drivers then happily go ahead ignore completely.
I'll definitely give wgpu a look. I don't need to make something that competes with Unreal 5 or anything, but I do think it would be neat to have my own engine.
Could you say more about which extensions you’re referring to? I’ve often heard this take, but found details vague and practical comparisons hard to find.
As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graphics (as opposed to the very different “learn GPU programming” goal).
If I was a beginner looking to get a basic understanding of graphics and wanted to play around, I shouldn’t have to know or care what a “shader” is or what a vertex buffer and index buffer are and why you’d use them. These low level concepts are just unnecessary “learning cliffs” that are only useful to existing experts in the field.
Maybe unpopular opinion: only a relative handful of developers working on actually making game engines need the detailed control Vulkan gives you. They are willing to put up with the minutiae and boilerplate needed to work at that low level because they need it. Everyone else would be better off with OpenGL.
> Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API.
OpenGL still works. You can set up an old-school glBegin()-glEnd() pipeline in as few as 10 lines of code, set up a camera and vertex transform, link in GLUT for some windowing, and you have the basic triangle/strip of triangles.
OpenGL is a fantastic way to introduce people to basic graphics programming. The really annoying part is textures, which can be gently abstracted over. However, at some point the abstractions will start to be either insufficient in terms of descriptive power, or inefficient, or leaky, and that's when advanced courses can go into Vulkan, CPU and then GPU-accelerated ray tracing, and more.
OpenGL still exists, runs and works fine on the two platforms that matter. I think its death has been overstated quite a bit.
With that said we decided to focus on DX12 eventually because it just made sense. I've written our platform layers targetting OpenGL, DX12, Vulkan and Metal and once you've just internalized all of these I really don't think the horribleness of the lower level APIs is as bad as people make them out to be. They're very debuggable, very clear and well supported.
OpenGL is still being maintained, it just isn't being updated. Since OpenGL 4.0 or something we've had vertex and pixel shaders. As a non-AAA developer, I can't imagine anything else I'd really need.
BTW: If anyone says OpenGL is "deprecated", laugh in their face.
If I were starting a new project, would it be unwise to just use OpenGL? It's what I'm used to, but people seem to talk about it as if it's deprecated or something.
I know it is on Apple, but let's just assume I don't care about Apple specifically.
The problem with 'something like SDL, but 3D' very quickly turns into a full blown engine. There's just such a combinatorial explosion of different ways to do things in 3D compared to 2D that 3D 'game engine' is either limiting or complicated.
OpenGL was designed as a way to more or less do that and it turned complicated fast.
To this day, the best 3D API I’ve used (and I’ve tried quite a few over the years) is Apple’s SceneKit. Just the right levels of abstraction needed to get things on the screen in a productive, performant manner for most common use cases, from data visualization to games, with no cruft.
I imagine it will still be around for a long time because Apple and a lot of large third party apps use it for simple 3D experiences. (E.g. the badges in the Apple Fitness app).
Apple wants devs to move to RealityKit, which does support non-AR 3D, but it is still pretty far from feature parity with SceneKit. Also RealityKit still has too many APIs that are either visionOS only or are available on every platform but visionOS.
Microrant: I absolutely loathe when I am told "move to new thing. Old thing is deprecated/unsupported" and the new thing is incredibly far from feature parity and usually never reaches parity, let alone exceeds it. This is not just an Apple problem.
Not my experience, unfortunately. I worked on a SceneKit project, it was bad.
In general, it suffered from the problem of even Apple not knowing what it was made for, and what it even is. For a 3D API, it has less features than OpenGL 2. For a game engine, it… also has way less features than the competition, which shouldn’t surprise anyone - game engines are hard, and the market leaders have been developed for _decades_. But that’s what it looks like the most - a game engine. (It even has physics.)
Customizing the rendering pipeline in SceneKit is absolutely horrible. The user is given a choice between two equally bad options: either adding SCNTechniques which are configurable through .plists and provide no feedback on what goes wrong with their configuration (as like 3D rendering isn’t hard enough already), or using “shader modifiers” - placing chunks of Metal code into one of 4 places of the SceneKit’s default shader which the end users _don’t even have the source code of_ without hacking into the debug build! Or pulling it from Github from people who already did that [_].
If you just need something that can display 3d data, SceneKit is still fine, but once there’s a requirement to make that look good, it’s better to throw everything away and hook up Unity instead.
Trying to write a ground up game engine in Metal is a very serious exercise in self-discipline. Literally everything you need is right at your finger tips with RealityKit / old SceneKit. It’s so tempting to cheat or take a few short cuts. There’s even a fully featured physics engine in there.
I followed tutorials for Vulkan. I liked vk-guide, until it updated to the latest version. People said the newer SDL is so much better, but I honestly had more fun and got things done back with Renderpasses.
I personally have just been building off of tutorials. But notwithstanding all of the boilerplate code, the enjoyability of a code base can be vastly different.
The most fun I’ve ever had coding, and still do at times, is with WebGL. I just based it off of the Mozilla tutorial and went from there. WebGLFundamentals has good articles…but to be honest I do not love their code
I think there are maintained community forks/reimplementations. FNA is probably something I would enjoy; that’s basically the level I want to program at.
I wonder if I can get it working with F# in Linux…
Frank Luna’s D3D11 bible is probably the closest thing we’ll get to a repetition spaced learning curriculum for 3D graphics at a level where you can do an assload with the knowledge.
No, it won’t teach you to derive things. Take Calculus I and II.
No, it won’t teach you about how light works. Take an advanced electrical engineering course on electromagnetism.
But it will teach you the nuts and bolts in an approachable way using what is by far an excellent graphics API, Direct3D 11. Even John Carmack approves.
From there on all the Vulkan, D3D12 shit is just memory fences buffers and queue management. Absolute trash that you shouldn’t use unless you have to.
I just want to be a bit picky and say that bike shedding means focusing on trivial matters while ignoring or being oblivious to the complicated parts. What he described sounded more like a combination of feature creep/over-engineering.
The author could also have used the phrase "hobby horsing", which is similar to bike shedding in that the individual is focusing on things that don't really push the project forward, but which rather give them personal pleasure, instead. Bike shedding usually is explained as "working out what color to paint the bike shed before the rest of the house is done".
I am fascinated with 3D/Gaming programming and watch a few YouTubers stream while they build games[1]. Honestly, it feels insanely more complicated than my wheelhouse of webapps and DevOps. As soon as you dive in, pixel shaders, compute shaders, geometry, linear algebra, partial differential equations (PDE). Brain meld.
>If you haven’t done any graphics programming before, you should start with OpenGL
I remember reading NeHe OpenGL tutorials about 23 years ago. I still believe it was one of the best tutorial series about anything in the way they were structured and how each tutorial built over knowledge acquired in previous ones.
Vulkan was one of the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. It's so unintuitive and tedious that seemingly drains the joy out of programming. Tiny brain =(
You don't have a tiny brain. Vulkan is a low-level chip abstraction API, and is about as joyful to use as a low-level USB API. For a more fun experience with very small amounts of source code needed to get started, I'd recommend trying OpenGL (especially pre-2.0 when they introduced shaders and started down the GPU-programming path), but the industry is dead-set on killing OpenGL for some reason.
Tbh, OpenGL sucks just as much as Vulkan, just in different ways. It's time to admit that Khronos is simply terrible at designing 3D APIs ;) (probably because there are too many cooks involved)
Vulkan is definitely a major pain and very difficult to learn... But once you've created an init function, a create buffer function, a create material function etc which you do once you can largely then just ignore it and write at a higher level.
I don't like Vulkan. I keep thinking did nobody look at this and think 'there must be a better way' but it's what we've got and mostly it's just learn it and write the code once
When I first tried to learn Vulkan, I felt the exact same way. As I was following the various Vulkan tutorials online, I felt that I was just copying the code, without understanding any of it and internalizing the concepts. So, I decided to learn WebGPU (via the Google Dawn implementation), which has a similar "modern" API to Vulkan, but much more simplified.
The commonalities to both are:
- Instances and devices
- Shaders and programs
- Pipelines
- Bind groups (in WebGPU) and descriptor sets (in Vulkan)
- GPU memory (textures, texture views, and buffers)
- Command buffers
Once I was comfortable with WebGPU, I eventually felt restrained by its limited feature set. The restrictions of WebGPU gave me the motivation to go back to Vulkan. Now, I'm learning Vulkan again, and this time, the high-level concepts are familiar to me from WebGPU.
Some limitations of WebGPU are its lack of push constants, and the "pipeline explosion" problem (which Vulkan tries to solve with the pipeline library, dynamic state, and shader object extensions). Meanwhile, Vulkan requires you to manage synchronization explicitly with fences and semaphores, which required an additional learning curve for me, coming from WebGPU. Vulkan also does not provide an allocator (most people use the VMA library).
SDL_GPU is another API at a similar abstraction level to WebGPU, and could also be another easier choice for learning than Vulkan, to get started. Therefore, if you're still interested in learning graphics programming, WebGPU or SDL_GPU could be good to check out.
Exactly the reason why I haven't switched from OpenGL to Vulkan. Vulkan is just ridiculously overengineered. Cuda shows that allocation of GPU memory and copy from host to device can be one-liners, yet in Vulkan it's an incredible amount of boilerplate to go through. Modern Vulkan fixes a lot of issues, like getting rid of pipelines, render passes, bindings, etc., but there is still much more to fix before it's usable.
I think anyone who ever looked at typical Vulcan code examples would reach the same conclusion: it's not for application/game developers.
I really hope SDL3 or wgpu could be the abstraction layer that settles all these down. I personally bet on SDL3 just because they have support from Valve, a company that has reasons to care about cross platform gaming. But I would look into wgpu too (...if I were better at rust, sigh)
Yep. Most of the engine and "game from scratch" tutorials on Youtube, etc, use this style of having OpenGL code strewn around the app.
With Vulkan this is borderline impossible and it becomes messy quite quickly. It's very low level. Unlike OpenGL, one really needs an abstraction layer on top, so you either gotta use a library or write your own in the end.
I love that it's becoming kind of cool to do hobby game engines. I've been working on a hobby engine for 10 years and it's been a very rewarding experience.
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I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics programming since I do think it would be fun to build a game engine, but I will admit that even getting started with the low level Vulkan stuff is still scary to me.
I think what I want is something like how SDL does 2D graphics, but for 3D. My understanding is that for 3D in SDL you just drop into OpenGL or something, which isn't quite what I want.
Maybe WebGPU would be something I could have fun working on.
Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine.
However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL GPU code, such as their approach to synchronization, which was a pattern that solved a lot of problems for me in my Vulkan engine, and made things a lot easier/nicer to work with.
I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.
The reason you don’t is that it does an amount of bookkeeping for you at runtime, only supports using a single, general queue per device, and several other limitations that only matter when you want to max out the capabilities of the hardware.
Vulkan is miserable, but several things are improved by using a few extensions supported by almost all relevant vendors. The misery mostly pays off, but there are a couple of cases where the API asks you for a lot of detail which all major drivers then happily go ahead ignore completely.
If I was a beginner looking to get a basic understanding of graphics and wanted to play around, I shouldn’t have to know or care what a “shader” is or what a vertex buffer and index buffer are and why you’d use them. These low level concepts are just unnecessary “learning cliffs” that are only useful to existing experts in the field.
Maybe unpopular opinion: only a relative handful of developers working on actually making game engines need the detailed control Vulkan gives you. They are willing to put up with the minutiae and boilerplate needed to work at that low level because they need it. Everyone else would be better off with OpenGL.
OpenGL still works. You can set up an old-school glBegin()-glEnd() pipeline in as few as 10 lines of code, set up a camera and vertex transform, link in GLUT for some windowing, and you have the basic triangle/strip of triangles.
OpenGL is a fantastic way to introduce people to basic graphics programming. The really annoying part is textures, which can be gently abstracted over. However, at some point the abstractions will start to be either insufficient in terms of descriptive power, or inefficient, or leaky, and that's when advanced courses can go into Vulkan, CPU and then GPU-accelerated ray tracing, and more.
With that said we decided to focus on DX12 eventually because it just made sense. I've written our platform layers targetting OpenGL, DX12, Vulkan and Metal and once you've just internalized all of these I really don't think the horribleness of the lower level APIs is as bad as people make them out to be. They're very debuggable, very clear and well supported.
BTW: If anyone says OpenGL is "deprecated", laugh in their face.
I know it is on Apple, but let's just assume I don't care about Apple specifically.
If you make a game instead of a game engine, you can use one of the existing engines.
OpenGL was designed as a way to more or less do that and it turned complicated fast.
Deleted Comment
Sadly 1) Apple only, 2) soft deprecated.
I imagine it will still be around for a long time because Apple and a lot of large third party apps use it for simple 3D experiences. (E.g. the badges in the Apple Fitness app).
Apple wants devs to move to RealityKit, which does support non-AR 3D, but it is still pretty far from feature parity with SceneKit. Also RealityKit still has too many APIs that are either visionOS only or are available on every platform but visionOS.
Microrant: I absolutely loathe when I am told "move to new thing. Old thing is deprecated/unsupported" and the new thing is incredibly far from feature parity and usually never reaches parity, let alone exceeds it. This is not just an Apple problem.
In general, it suffered from the problem of even Apple not knowing what it was made for, and what it even is. For a 3D API, it has less features than OpenGL 2. For a game engine, it… also has way less features than the competition, which shouldn’t surprise anyone - game engines are hard, and the market leaders have been developed for _decades_. But that’s what it looks like the most - a game engine. (It even has physics.)
Customizing the rendering pipeline in SceneKit is absolutely horrible. The user is given a choice between two equally bad options: either adding SCNTechniques which are configurable through .plists and provide no feedback on what goes wrong with their configuration (as like 3D rendering isn’t hard enough already), or using “shader modifiers” - placing chunks of Metal code into one of 4 places of the SceneKit’s default shader which the end users _don’t even have the source code of_ without hacking into the debug build! Or pulling it from Github from people who already did that [_].
If you just need something that can display 3d data, SceneKit is still fine, but once there’s a requirement to make that look good, it’s better to throw everything away and hook up Unity instead.
[_] https://gist.github.com/warrenm/794e459e429daa8c75b5f17c0006...
I find SDL3 more fun and interesting, but it’s a ton of work to to get going.
I personally have just been building off of tutorials. But notwithstanding all of the boilerplate code, the enjoyability of a code base can be vastly different.
The most fun I’ve ever had coding, and still do at times, is with WebGL. I just based it off of the Mozilla tutorial and went from there. WebGLFundamentals has good articles…but to be honest I do not love their code
I wonder if I can get it working with F# in Linux…
Frank Luna’s D3D11 bible is probably the closest thing we’ll get to a repetition spaced learning curriculum for 3D graphics at a level where you can do an assload with the knowledge.
No, it won’t teach you to derive things. Take Calculus I and II.
No, it won’t teach you about how light works. Take an advanced electrical engineering course on electromagnetism.
But it will teach you the nuts and bolts in an approachable way using what is by far an excellent graphics API, Direct3D 11. Even John Carmack approves.
From there on all the Vulkan, D3D12 shit is just memory fences buffers and queue management. Absolute trash that you shouldn’t use unless you have to.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/@tokyospliff
Plenty of people make minecraft-like games as their first engine. As far as voxel engines go, a minecraft clone is "hello, world."
I remember reading NeHe OpenGL tutorials about 23 years ago. I still believe it was one of the best tutorial series about anything in the way they were structured and how each tutorial built over knowledge acquired in previous ones.
Tbh, OpenGL sucks just as much as Vulkan, just in different ways. It's time to admit that Khronos is simply terrible at designing 3D APIs ;) (probably because there are too many cooks involved)
I don't like Vulkan. I keep thinking did nobody look at this and think 'there must be a better way' but it's what we've got and mostly it's just learn it and write the code once
The commonalities to both are:
- Instances and devices
- Shaders and programs
- Pipelines
- Bind groups (in WebGPU) and descriptor sets (in Vulkan)
- GPU memory (textures, texture views, and buffers)
- Command buffers
Once I was comfortable with WebGPU, I eventually felt restrained by its limited feature set. The restrictions of WebGPU gave me the motivation to go back to Vulkan. Now, I'm learning Vulkan again, and this time, the high-level concepts are familiar to me from WebGPU.
Some limitations of WebGPU are its lack of push constants, and the "pipeline explosion" problem (which Vulkan tries to solve with the pipeline library, dynamic state, and shader object extensions). Meanwhile, Vulkan requires you to manage synchronization explicitly with fences and semaphores, which required an additional learning curve for me, coming from WebGPU. Vulkan also does not provide an allocator (most people use the VMA library).
SDL_GPU is another API at a similar abstraction level to WebGPU, and could also be another easier choice for learning than Vulkan, to get started. Therefore, if you're still interested in learning graphics programming, WebGPU or SDL_GPU could be good to check out.
The question you need to ask is: "Do I need my graphics to be multithreaded?"
If the answer is "No"--don't use Vulkan/DX12! You wind up with all the complexity and absolutely zero of the benefits.
If performance isn't a problem, using anything else--OpenGL, DirectX 11, game engines, etc.
Once performance becomes the problem, then you can think about Vulkan/DX12.
I really hope SDL3 or wgpu could be the abstraction layer that settles all these down. I personally bet on SDL3 just because they have support from Valve, a company that has reasons to care about cross platform gaming. But I would look into wgpu too (...if I were better at rust, sigh)
With Vulkan this is borderline impossible and it becomes messy quite quickly. It's very low level. Unlike OpenGL, one really needs an abstraction layer on top, so you either gotta use a library or write your own in the end.