How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
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Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#2Note that I have retained the original title of the post, but I am not the author.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#3(2024) At the time (625 points, 260 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40595741
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#4My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605
I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics programming since I do think it would be fun to build a game engine, but I will admit that even getting started with the low level Vulkan stuff is still scary to me.
I think what I want is something like how SDL does 2D graphics, but for 3D. My understanding is that for 3D in SDL you just drop into OpenGL or something, which isn't quite what I want.
Maybe WebGPU would be something I could have fun working on.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#5My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
If you don't need 4K PBR rendering, a software renderer is a lot of fun to write.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#6My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
Unironically I think I can help.
Frank Luna’s D3D11 bible is probably the closest thing we’ll get to a repetition spaced learning curriculum for 3D graphics at a level where you can do an assload with the knowledge.
No, it won’t teach you to derive things. Take Calculus I and II.
No, it won’t teach you about how light works. Take an advanced electrical engineering course on electromagnetism.
But it will teach you the nuts and bolts in an approachable way using what is by far an excellent graphics API, Direct3D 11. Even John Carmack approves.
From there on all the Vulkan, D3D12 shit is just memory fences buffers and queue management. Absolute trash that you shouldn’t use unless you have to.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#7My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
`wgpu` in Rust is an excellent middle ground, matching the abstraction level of WebGPU. More capable than OpenGL, but you don’t have to deal with things like resource barriers and layout transitions.
The reason you don’t is that it does an amount of bookkeeping for you at runtime, only supports using a single, general queue per device, and several other limitations that only matter when you want to max out the capabilities of the hardware.
Vulkan is miserable, but several things are improved by using a few extensions supported by almost all relevant vendors. The misery mostly pays off, but there are a couple of cases where the API asks you for a lot of detail which all major drivers then happily go ahead ignore completely.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#8My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
SDL 3.0 introduced their GPU API a year or so ago, which is an abstraction layer on top of vulkan/others, might want to check it out.
Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine.
However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL GPU code, such as their approach to synchronization, which was a pattern that solved a lot of problems for me in my Vulkan engine, and made things a lot easier/nicer to work with.
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#9My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
If you don't need 4K PBR rendering, a software renderer is a lot of fun to write.
Interesting. I wouldn't actually mind learning how to do that; any tips on how/where to get started?
Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)
#10My opinions of Vulkan have not changed significantly since this was posted a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601605 I'm sure Vulkan is fun and wonderful for people who really want low level control of the graphic stack, but I found it completely miserable to use. I still haven't really found a graphics API that works at the level I want that I enjoyed using; I would like to get more into graphics prog…
`wgpu` in Rust is an excellent middle ground, matching the abstraction level of WebGPU. More capable than OpenGL, but you don’t have to deal with things like resource barriers and layout transitions. The reason you don’t is that it does an amount of bookkeeping for you at runtime, only supports using a single, general queue per device, and several other limitations that only matter when you want to max out the capabi…
I'll definitely give wgpu a look. I don't need to make something that competes with Unreal 5 or anything, but I do think it would be neat to have my own engine.