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Really nice article! I have some OpenGL familiarity and tried out Vulkan but bounced off of it due to all of the up-front complexity just getting something runn

Really nice article! I have some OpenGL familiarity and tried out Vulkan but bounced off of it due to all of the up-front complexity just getting something running. Might give it another shot now!

eliasdaler 2y ago
Thank you. The up-front complexity is still there and it might take quite a few days to see your first triangle. But I promise, everything will get much easier from that point. :)
- mort96 2y ago
  The thing I'm most interested in doing when starting a new project is pretty much never to spend a few weeks and writing 10-20k LOC to get a triangle on the screen, I think I'll stick with OpenGL for the time being tbh
  - eliasdaler 2y ago
    You'll need 1k LOC to draw a single triangle and not 10-20k. Sticking with OpenGL is understandable, but I can recommend learning some Vulkan as a side project (with the help of vkguide) without too much commitment. That's how I started and it turned out to be not as bad as I imagined! Uour mileage may vary, of course.
jsheard 2y ago
It's not quite as bad as it used to be, various later additions to Vulkan like dynamic rendering have eliminated some of the complexity it originally had. Figuring out which subset you should be using is a challenge in itself though, especially since there's a lot of outdated introductory resources floating around which still promote the ultra-verbose Vulkan 1.0 way of doing things. If a tutorial tells you to use render passes, run away.
- galangalalgol 2y ago
  Interesting, for a while the guidance for a while was to learn webgpu instead unless you needed all that extra control. Do you think these changes modify that guidance?
  - jsheard 2y ago
    WebGPU (or Metal if you're in Apple land) still has a much gentler learning curve. The simplifications to Vulkan weren't really aimed at making it easier to use, just streamlining parts of the API which turned out to be needlessly complex, so the parts that are complex for a reason are still just as complex.
    - galangalalgol 2y ago
      Thanks! Other than a project not running as fast as necessary, do you have any advice on how to know when/if I need to switch to vulkan?
      - jsheard 2y ago
        Aside from performance there's also just more hardware features exposed via Vulkan, as a sibling mentioned if you want to do anything with raytracing for example then you will have to graduate to Vulkan in order to take advantage of hardware acceleration.
  - exDM69 2y ago
    With WebGPU/wgpu you don't get mesh shaders, ray tracing or shader subgroup/wave/warp operations. Its feature set is comparable to Vulkan 1.0, and Vulkan has progressed a lot since. And WebGPU still requires all the RenderPass setup code which is a lot of boilerplate that Vulkan no longer requires.
    - jms55 2y ago
      Subgroups have actually been added very recently. The rest, sadly missing (along with multi-queue and bindless) :(
eliasdaler 2y ago
vkguide is a great way to get a feel of modern Vulkan. Maybe it’ll be still to complex for you - then it’s okay to say on OpenGL or learn some WebGPU. I started learning Vulkan as an experiment and it seemed to work out well, so that’s why I wrote this article. :)

Really nice article! I have some OpenGL familiarity and tried out Vulkan but bounced off of it due to all of the up-front complexity just getting something running. Might give it another shot now!

eliasdaler 2y ago

Thank you. The up-front complexity is still there and it might take quite a few days to see your first triangle. But I promise, everything will get much easier from that point. :)

mort96 2y ago
The thing I'm most interested in doing when starting a new project is pretty much never to spend a few weeks and writing 10-20k LOC to get a triangle on the screen, I think I'll stick with OpenGL for the time being tbh
- eliasdaler 2y ago
  You'll need 1k LOC to draw a single triangle and not 10-20k. Sticking with OpenGL is understandable, but I can recommend learning some Vulkan as a side project (with the help of vkguide) without too much commitment. That's how I started and it turned out to be not as bad as I imagined! Uour mileage may vary, of course.

jsheard 2y ago

It's not quite as bad as it used to be, various later additions to Vulkan like dynamic rendering have eliminated some of the complexity it originally had. Figuring out which subset you should be using is a challenge in itself though, especially since there's a lot of outdated introductory resources floating around which still promote the ultra-verbose Vulkan 1.0 way of doing things. If a tutorial tells you to use render passes, run away.

galangalalgol 2y ago
Interesting, for a while the guidance for a while was to learn webgpu instead unless you needed all that extra control. Do you think these changes modify that guidance?
- jsheard 2y ago
  WebGPU (or Metal if you're in Apple land) still has a much gentler learning curve. The simplifications to Vulkan weren't really aimed at making it easier to use, just streamlining parts of the API which turned out to be needlessly complex, so the parts that are complex for a reason are still just as complex.
  - galangalalgol 2y ago
    Thanks! Other than a project not running as fast as necessary, do you have any advice on how to know when/if I need to switch to vulkan?
    - jsheard 2y ago
      Aside from performance there's also just more hardware features exposed via Vulkan, as a sibling mentioned if you want to do anything with raytracing for example then you will have to graduate to Vulkan in order to take advantage of hardware acceleration.
- exDM69 2y ago
  With WebGPU/wgpu you don't get mesh shaders, ray tracing or shader subgroup/wave/warp operations. Its feature set is comparable to Vulkan 1.0, and Vulkan has progressed a lot since. And WebGPU still requires all the RenderPass setup code which is a lot of boilerplate that Vulkan no longer requires.
  - jms55 2y ago
    Subgroups have actually been added very recently. The rest, sadly missing (along with multi-queue and bindless) :(

eliasdaler 2y ago

vkguide is a great way to get a feel of modern Vulkan. Maybe it’ll be still to complex for you - then it’s okay to say on OpenGL or learn some WebGPU. I started learning Vulkan as an experiment and it seemed to work out well, so that’s why I wrote this article. :)