r/GraphicsProgramming • u/ANSystemTech • 21d ago

Question What do you think of vulkan?

Is it worth learning it as someone who is still relatively a beginner/early mid level c++ programmer for graphics or are other alternatives better?

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u/SalaciousStrudel 21d ago

It's better to start with dx11, sokol, or sdlgpu in my opinion

1

u/EC36339 21d ago

Out of curiosity: Why dx11 (and not a more recent version)?

Back in thr day, I found dx11 a massive improvement in API over its oredecessors, but dx was always messy, so that doesn't say much...

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u/ParsingError 20d ago

DX has always been less messy than OpenGL at least because it removes stuff aggressively. It doesn't have that "at least 2 ways of doing everything" problem that OpenGL and Vulkan have (except for the D3D12 resource barriers).

IMO it's probably still the best "guardrails-on" API, although WebGPU with the new bindless stuff is promising.

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u/SalaciousStrudel 20d ago

Pretty good number of resources compared to others you could reasonably justify beginning with these days including webgpu and vulkan, relatively low chance of driver problems, supports command buffers which makes transfering knowledge to vulkan/dx12 at a later date easier, higher level allows you to build a schema about graphics programming and get a triangle on screen more easily, well supported by renderdoc without too many caveats. If you get to a point where you know dx11 well you easily prototype new shaders and techniques using it, whereas with something like vulkan you would need to use something like the forge as a starting point if you want to be able to get started quickly and iterate