Learn OpenGL, extensive tutorial resource for learning Modern OpenGL

A data point: "OpenGL ES is still supported on Android, but is no longer under active feature development. Vulkan offers the following advantages over OpenGL ES" "Vulkan is the preferred Android interface to the GPU. Android 15 and up includes ANGLE as an optional layer for running OpenGL ES on top of Vulkan."

https://developer.android.com/games/develop/vulkan/overview

OpenGL is limited to 4.1 on Apple platforms if I am not mistaken, and will not get updated ever. So you will run into missing features eventually on some platforms, e.g. SSBOs are really nice but you can't them use on Apple devices.

For me, a much stronger argument against OpenGL is that is requires a global state. This often leads to bad design, is miserable to multi-thread, and is rather tedious to port to Vulkan. I have spent several years fighting with multi-threading applications doing all sort of things in OpenGL and it is not great. Yes, Vulkan is extremely painful to set-up and you have to think about a million things you might not really care about directly, but honestly, I would also recommend against starting anything serious in OpenGL. To get your hands wet maybe, as with a couple lines you can get something running..

The one and only Holy Bible of Graphics Programming. If you're starting to learn computer graphics, just study through the entire site and do the examples one by one. It doesn't matter one bit that it uses a slightly outdated API called OpenGL - you're supposed to learn how to render things first, not about some weird obscure hardware / driver details!

After you've learned it, you can start learning CUDA if you want to do some more low-level compute stuff on the GPU (sorry, but you should just buy an NVIDIA card, CUDA is just that good). Or if you actually want to just make things but want to use a nicer cross-platform graphics API than OpenGL, then I recommend SDL3. (Or use Metal if you want to make macOS exclusive apps - it's actually a quite nice API)

Vulkan or DX12 are currently flawed APIs that are unnecessarily complex and doesn't even match the performance characteristics of current-gen hardware anymore. (see the titular post: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api). However if you want a computer graphics career (either in the game industry or in other niche domains) having experience with these APIs will be beneficial since these are what many production apps are currently stuck with - though honestly the job market for graphics really suck nowadays. (The biggest sector was triple-A game companies with their own engines, but the game industry is imploding right now...)

I still think that OpenGL is a better place to start learning 3D because there is so much less bookkeeping to do regarding memory and concurrency vs. Vulkan. I'm working on a "Post-Modern OpenGL" tutorial that exclusively teaches the most "modern" (merely a decade old) APIs and practices of GL 4.6. But, writing is slow going...

If you are going to use Vulkan, check out https://howtovulkan.com/ Vulkan started with a lot of compromises to make mobile hardware happy at the expense of making everything overly complicated on desktop. Over the past decade, desktop devs have managed to get a lot of features added to make Vulkan on desktop more sane. How To Vulkan covers that newer approach. This recent video "It's Not About the API" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bSzp-QildA shows how simple it can be if you let it.

And, if you are on a Mac, folks who use Metal like it a lot. Don't worry about lock-in. Once you learn the basics, knowledge is easily transferable to DX12 and Vulkan. You should plan to write 3 or 4 renderers to throw away anyway :P