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The advice to not learn Vulkan first is actually pretty good, because it aligns with most people's goals when learning. Most people want to get some graphics o

The advice to not learn Vulkan first is actually pretty good, because it aligns with most people's goals when learning. Most people want to get some graphics on the screen and maybe understand what a shader is, how meshes are represented etc. OpenGL has less friction here, and I'd argue that you can learn a lot of this starting in a higher level environment like Unity, writing your own shaders and creating procedural meshes. This advice comes from the same place as "if you want to make a game don't write your own engine", which is probably works for most people. Vulkan is great as a beginner if you want deep understanding of the graphics pipeline and are ok with some pain and confusion and a lot of "boilerplate", which comes from Vulkan having few defaults. Its a good representation of how game engines tend to use graphics APIs vs toy applications, academic projects and indie games you might see as smaller scale examples. As a beginner and a hobbyist you probably don't need Vulkan or DX12 for anything you'll build and you'll quickly be exposed to a lot of concepts you won't really understand, but I think sticking with it will give you a level of understanding much deeper than someone that dabbles with OpenGL.

throwawaybbq1 9y ago
Is there a serious MOOC that gets into this? I'd like some academic rigour rather than some kid on YouTube. I tried the Unity route and had issues with shaders. Trying to get into GPU programming.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I tried courses a few years back, but what actually helped me get into OpenGL (I started with ES2 because it was compatible with every device I owned) was to find an existing OpenGL ES 2.0 program which compiled and ran on my computer, and tinker with that week after week. I think I have a pretty good grasp now of shading and how to take good advantage of the pipeline stages. I suspect Vulkan will require the same sort of effort. I bought the Programming Guide in the first preorder campaign, but I think the way I will learn Vulkan is by transplanting my pet ES2 projects into an existing Vulkan skeleton.
- Impossible 9y ago
  What issues did you have with shaders? Unity doesn't always make documentation easy to browse, especially when it comes to shaders, but outside of shadertoy its one of the best environments to just start writing shader code with limited setup. If you don't understand Unity (like what a game object or component or material is) it will be challenging to drive into writing shader code first though. There is a MOOC on Udacity that is introductory, but could be good for you if you are a beginner. A lot of the deep information about graphics is in vendor documentation and GDC or siggraph presentations. Some of it is in blogs or books. If by GPU programming you're thinking more compute focused than graphics, reading Nvidia's CUDA documentation and tutorials could be a good start.
- greggman 9y ago
  Start with WebGL? The concepts are the same. http://webglfundamentals.com http://webglfundamentals.com
- animal531 9y ago
  It's relatively easy in Unity to get OpenGL going. For 3d Objects: 1. Create a mesh. There are a lot of tutorials/free asset store helper classes that can show you how to do this, alternatively just copy the mesh out of an instanced object 2. Assign a pre-made shader to it 3. Render it with OpenGL, e.g. GL.DrawMesh/Instanced For general starter OpenGL you can just make calls using GL.Begin etc. The nice thing about doing this is that things like lighting, shaders, OpenGL state switching/machine etc. are already taken care of for you (and those little things can take a long time to figure out if you're new).
  - throwawaybbq1 9y ago
    Thank you. The OpenGL calls you refer to .. is there a C# binding that is easy to setup with Unity? I tried OpenGL in a computer graphics undergrad course (sadly, one I dropped) and it was a crazy amount of C/C++ libraries and header files (along with esoteric things like GLUT, etc.). I didn't realize I could do OpenGL within a Unity/C# context.
ss248 9y ago
Graphics programming in general has a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning compared to other fields of programming. Even with simpler OpenGL it's not so easy. You need to have quite a bit of knowledge before you even get your first triangle (hello world of graphics programming). Context creation, extension loading, buffer objects, matrices, shader writing and compiling. Even with frameworks to help you, it's much more complex than your usual hello world.
- fulafel 9y ago
  Yes, OpenGL is pretty low level too. It may be better to start with a high level library or framework, you can still drop down to writing shaders, octrees or tessellators or whatever for experiments.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    On the old days OpenInventor was a good introduction to OpenGL, nowadays maybe something like three.js or babylon.js. Just to get the hang of it.
  - badsectoracula 9y ago
    Well, you can ignore all that and use glBegin, glEnd, glColor, glRotate, glTranslate and all that stuff. If you are ok with having OpenGL manage your resources and GPU memory, you should also be ok with having OpenGL manage your vertex buffers and vertex attributes too. It also makes it easier to transition from "use red color for a rotated triangle" to "use this shader that uses the red color i asked for a rotated triangle" to "use this shader that uses this vertex attribute (that happens to be a color) and this global (that happens to be a transformation matrix)". The only issue with this approach is that "officially" that stuff is deprecated but at least in practice Nvidia has said that they're not planning on ever removing that functionality and it also seems to be the case with AMD's own OpenGL implementation. The only issue is with the Linux drivers that depend on Mesa (and i hope this is a temporary roadblock), like the open source AMD drivers, and with Apple's OpenGL implementation. But even then this would only be an issue when you want to start using the more advanced stuff (since you can still use the older API in both Mesa and Apple, it is just that you cannot mix it with the newer calls), at which point you'd probably be ready to switch to Vulkan anyway.
hacker_9 9y ago
> OpenGL has less friction here I've never thought this, in fact I find the OpenGL API makes things harder to understand because of it's basically massive hidden state machine that it has going on. For beginners I agree to recommend using Unity/Unreal to understand all the stages of a game engine, as there is just so many layers these days. Actually using Vulkan is something that comes much later, as a side project to learn how it works, or when you're in a company which has the resources to build it's own engine.

throwawaybbq1 9y ago

Is there a serious MOOC that gets into this? I'd like some academic rigour rather than some kid on YouTube. I tried the Unity route and had issues with shaders. Trying to get into GPU programming.

microcolonel 9y ago
I tried courses a few years back, but what actually helped me get into OpenGL (I started with ES2 because it was compatible with every device I owned) was to find an existing OpenGL ES 2.0 program which compiled and ran on my computer, and tinker with that week after week. I think I have a pretty good grasp now of shading and how to take good advantage of the pipeline stages. I suspect Vulkan will require the same sort of effort. I bought the Programming Guide in the first preorder campaign, but I think the way I will learn Vulkan is by transplanting my pet ES2 projects into an existing Vulkan skeleton.
Impossible 9y ago
What issues did you have with shaders? Unity doesn't always make documentation easy to browse, especially when it comes to shaders, but outside of shadertoy its one of the best environments to just start writing shader code with limited setup. If you don't understand Unity (like what a game object or component or material is) it will be challenging to drive into writing shader code first though. There is a MOOC on Udacity that is introductory, but could be good for you if you are a beginner. A lot of the deep information about graphics is in vendor documentation and GDC or siggraph presentations. Some of it is in blogs or books. If by GPU programming you're thinking more compute focused than graphics, reading Nvidia's CUDA documentation and tutorials could be a good start.
greggman 9y ago
Start with WebGL? The concepts are the same. http://webglfundamentals.com http://webglfundamentals.com
animal531 9y ago
It's relatively easy in Unity to get OpenGL going. For 3d Objects: 1. Create a mesh. There are a lot of tutorials/free asset store helper classes that can show you how to do this, alternatively just copy the mesh out of an instanced object 2. Assign a pre-made shader to it 3. Render it with OpenGL, e.g. GL.DrawMesh/Instanced For general starter OpenGL you can just make calls using GL.Begin etc. The nice thing about doing this is that things like lighting, shaders, OpenGL state switching/machine etc. are already taken care of for you (and those little things can take a long time to figure out if you're new).
- throwawaybbq1 9y ago
  Thank you. The OpenGL calls you refer to .. is there a C# binding that is easy to setup with Unity? I tried OpenGL in a computer graphics undergrad course (sadly, one I dropped) and it was a crazy amount of C/C++ libraries and header files (along with esoteric things like GLUT, etc.). I didn't realize I could do OpenGL within a Unity/C# context.

ss248 9y ago

Graphics programming in general has a pretty steep learning curve in the beginning compared to other fields of programming. Even with simpler OpenGL it's not so easy. You need to have quite a bit of knowledge before you even get your first triangle (hello world of graphics programming). Context creation, extension loading, buffer objects, matrices, shader writing and compiling. Even with frameworks to help you, it's much more complex than your usual hello world.

fulafel 9y ago
Yes, OpenGL is pretty low level too. It may be better to start with a high level library or framework, you can still drop down to writing shaders, octrees or tessellators or whatever for experiments.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  On the old days OpenInventor was a good introduction to OpenGL, nowadays maybe something like three.js or babylon.js. Just to get the hang of it.
- badsectoracula 9y ago
  Well, you can ignore all that and use glBegin, glEnd, glColor, glRotate, glTranslate and all that stuff. If you are ok with having OpenGL manage your resources and GPU memory, you should also be ok with having OpenGL manage your vertex buffers and vertex attributes too. It also makes it easier to transition from "use red color for a rotated triangle" to "use this shader that uses the red color i asked for a rotated triangle" to "use this shader that uses this vertex attribute (that happens to be a color) and this global (that happens to be a transformation matrix)". The only issue with this approach is that "officially" that stuff is deprecated but at least in practice Nvidia has said that they're not planning on ever removing that functionality and it also seems to be the case with AMD's own OpenGL implementation. The only issue is with the Linux drivers that depend on Mesa (and i hope this is a temporary roadblock), like the open source AMD drivers, and with Apple's OpenGL implementation. But even then this would only be an issue when you want to start using the more advanced stuff (since you can still use the older API in both Mesa and Apple, it is just that you cannot mix it with the newer calls), at which point you'd probably be ready to switch to Vulkan anyway.

hacker_9 9y ago

> OpenGL has less friction here I've never thought this, in fact I find the OpenGL API makes things harder to understand because of it's basically massive hidden state machine that it has going on. For beginners I agree to recommend using Unity/Unreal to understand all the stages of a game engine, as there is just so many layers these days. Actually using Vulkan is something that comes much later, as a side project to learn how it works, or when you're in a company which has the resources to build it's own engine.