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Except Vulkan is a giant pain in the ass to set up. Just getting through the Vulkan tutorial is a weekend long affair.
by VHRanger 7y ago
Except Vulkan is a giant pain in the ass to set up.
Just getting through the Vulkan tutorial is a weekend long affair.
- whatshisface 7y agoSurely once one person has gone through the Vulkan tutorial, everyone else can copy them?
- skohan 7y agoThe problem is that Vulkan's power comes from specificity: in other words you can plan your resources and executions for exactly your use case which gives great performance with little overhead. The trade-off is because everything is so hand-tailored, it's very difficult to generalize, so just copy-pasting an implementation is only useful if you want to do exactly the same thing.
- pjmlp 7y agoNo, Vulkan follows the learning path of OpenGL. Instead of having a nice SDK like the proprietaty APIs do, you are expected to go hunting for books and online tutorials about third party libraries so that you can go through all basic steps of loading shaders, textures, font files, gui frameworks and display something. Also in the process you will implement your own scene graph and material support. Consider it the rite of passage into Khronos' land, which every graphics programming student throughout the world has to go through. Yes, there is LunarG SDK, however it is quite anemic versus what VS + DirectXTK, XCode + MetalKit, PS4 SDK, Switch SDK offer as out of the box experience.
- whatshisface 7y agoHonestly if Vulkan followed the path of OpenGL it would be about 100x easier than it really is!
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoIf you really want to understand what is going on, those SDKs are useless at best, though. They are fine to get some complex features working specially early on, yes, but not for learning.
- pjmlp 7y agoYet that is one of the biggest complains in the latest Vulkan survey, lack of support for learning. Those SDKs allow plenty of wanna be game developers to just be doing rotating cubes in less than a couple of minutes and go from there. Sit in a room trying to go through NeHe tutorials and watch students motivation slowly fade away.
- jfkebwjsbx 7y agoIt depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to teach gamedev, then I agree it is a pain. However, if you teach a general graphics course in a CS curriculum, then the slow, spec-like approach is way better. Regardless I never liked the NeHe tutorials for some reason. I did them when fixed pipeline was a thing and they bore me a lot, yeah... but when I learnt modern GL properly it was way better. Seeing a cube rotate is irrelevant to motivation as long as you understand what you are doing, in my experience.
- indeyets 7y agoCouldn't it be solved with a universal template? Something like bootstrapper for computation applications?
- pjmlp 7y agoIt could be sorted out with a friendly begginers SDK, but Khronos sees that as responsibility for the partners, they just do specs.
- skohan 7y agoBut once you get competent it's like having super powers