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Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

learnopengl.com

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Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#2
I've gotten through the Getting Started section and found it to be quite good overall. A few times it seems to make some jumps back and forth between slightly different setups, which might lead to some problems debugging.

I definitely recommend it to anyone interested! Honestly one of the biggest things it helps with is explaining the setup boilerplate for OpenGL.

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#3
Man, this takes me back! I made a Minecraft clone called Mindacraft in Java using LWJGL (the same framework Minecraft uses) about 6 or 7 years ago using this tutorial. I vividly remember this tutorial being the most useful resource for OpenGL by an order of magnitude, and that was with it being written in a language that actually had pointers and buffers! (Using OpenGL in Java is very weird because you have to use pointers and buffers through a bunch of wrapper classes, and it makes things a lot weirder. It's like using unsafe in Rust if unsafe wasn't even in Rust).

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#5
If you want to use the learned knowledge I would recommend to use something like Sokol [0] or use the SDL-GPU API [1]. While Sokol is more higher level both can be used. Otherwise learn opengl is a really good introduction.

[0] https://github.com/floooh/sokol [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#6

Any recommendations on how to use OpenGL from the CLR (.Net/C#) please?

Typically just find bindings for your language and adapt the startup/bootstrap to match your language syntax. Opengl calls are fairly agnostic especially when you move to the shader logic.

The biggest issue with c# dev is OS specific window management. CLR doesn't have good wayland support yet if you're trying to do this from a modern Linux distro.

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#8

In 2026: Please don't learn this; it's obsolete. Learn Vulkan (Or another modern API; or how to build engines on top of them; or how to write shaders; or how to do GPU compute using CUDA etc)

OpenGL is not obsolete and is totally fine for many use cases. Vulkan is way too complicated and cumbersome for many.

Even if OpenGL doesn't get new features what exists now will continue to work for decades.

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#9

In 2026: Please don't learn this; it's obsolete. Learn Vulkan (Or another modern API; or how to build engines on top of them; or how to write shaders; or how to do GPU compute using CUDA etc)

It's so much easier than Vulkan or writing shaders and the performance is more than good enough for a lot of applications.

I wonder if somebody has written a adapter layer to write old OpenGL and translate it on the fly to Vulkan?

Re: Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

#10
post #8

In 2026: Please don't learn this; it's obsolete. Learn Vulkan (Or another modern API; or how to build engines on top of them; or how to write shaders; or how to do GPU compute using CUDA etc)

OpenGL is not obsolete and is totally fine for many use cases. Vulkan is way too complicated and cumbersome for many. Even if OpenGL doesn't get new features what exists now will continue to work for decades.

Sadly, the OP is right, OpenGL is deprecated on a number of platforms and down right removed from others. Please don't learn this now. Vulkan has the shape of every modern graphics api out there, DX included. Learn this or at the very least WebGPU.
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