I used to feel like this with OpenGL; the ammount of complexity to get my head around was so large that most of it had drained out of my ears between projects.

I used to feel like this with OpenGL; the ammount of complexity to get my head around was so large that most of it had drained out of my ears between projects. I've been working on something recently using modern OpenGL though, and i've found it a lot more manageable. Because there's no longer a fixed pipeline -- you have to write your own shaders to be able to do anything 3D graphics related, the pltform is vastly simpler, to the point of being relatively easy to understand, if still a little complex to use. The API is still quite crusty; there's little in the way of abstraction, and you often have to make quite a few calls to do simple stuff, but it's conceptually a lot cleaner.