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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)

#11

Post by gyomu »

tombert wrote: post #4

My 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…

To this day, the best 3D API I’ve used (and I’ve tried quite a few over the years) is Apple’s SceneKit. Just the right levels of abstraction needed to get things on the screen in a productive, performant manner for most common use cases, from data visualization to games, with no cruft.

Sadly 1) Apple only, 2) soft deprecated.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#13

Post by ryandrake »

tombert wrote: post #4

My 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…

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graphics (as opposed to the very different “learn GPU programming” goal).

If I was a beginner looking to get a basic understanding of graphics and wanted to play around, I shouldn’t have to know or care what a “shader” is or what a vertex buffer and index buffer are and why you’d use them. These low level concepts are just unnecessary “learning cliffs” that are only useful to existing experts in the field.

Maybe unpopular opinion: only a relative handful of developers working on actually making game engines need the detailed control Vulkan gives you. They are willing to put up with the minutiae and boilerplate needed to work at that low level because they need it. Everyone else would be better off with OpenGL.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#14

Post by ryandrake »

thegrim33 wrote: post #8
tombert wrote: post #4

My 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…

I'm working with SDL GPU now, and while it's nice, it hasn't quite cracked the cross platform nut yet. You still need to maintain and load platform-specific shaders for each incompatible ecosystem, or you need a set of "source of truth" HLSL shaders that your build system processes into platform-specific shaders, through a set of disparate tools that you have to download from all over the place, that really should be one tool. I have high hopes for SDL_shadercross to one day become that tool.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#15

Post by phendrenad2 »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
tombert wrote: post #4

My 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…

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graph…

OpenGL is still being maintained, it just isn't being updated. Since OpenGL 4.0 or something we've had vertex and pixel shaders. As a non-AAA developer, I can't imagine anything else I'd really need.

BTW: If anyone says OpenGL is "deprecated", laugh in their face.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#16

Post by ryandrake »

anvuong wrote: post #12

Vulkan was one of the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. It's so unintuitive and tedious that seemingly drains the joy out of programming. Tiny brain =(

You don't have a tiny brain. Vulkan is a low-level chip abstraction API, and is about as joyful to use as a low-level USB API. For a more fun experience with very small amounts of source code needed to get started, I'd recommend trying OpenGL (especially pre-2.0 when they introduced shaders and started down the GPU-programming path), but the industry is dead-set on killing OpenGL for some reason.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#17

Post by ryandrake »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #15
ryandrake wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who did OpenGL programming for a very, very long time, I fully agree with you. Without OpenGL being maintained, we are missing a critical “middle” drawing API. We have the very high level game engines, and very low level things like Vulkan and Metal which are basically thin abstractions on top of GPU hardware. But we are missing that fun “draw a triangle” middle API that lets you pick up and learn 3D Graph…

OpenGL is still being maintained, it just isn't being updated. Since OpenGL 4.0 or something we've had vertex and pixel shaders. As a non-AAA developer, I can't imagine anything else I'd really need. BTW: If anyone says OpenGL is "deprecated", laugh in their face.

OK, maybe OpenGL is not "unmaintained" but the major OS and hardware vendors have certainly handed him his hat.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#18

Post by bsder »

anvuong wrote: post #12

Vulkan was one of the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. It's so unintuitive and tedious that seemingly drains the joy out of programming. Tiny brain =(

You don't have a tiny brain--programming Vulkan/DX12 sucks.

The question you need to ask is: "Do I need my graphics to be multithreaded?"

If the answer is "No"--don't use Vulkan/DX12! You wind up with all the complexity and absolutely zero of the benefits.

If performance isn't a problem, using anything else--OpenGL, DirectX 11, game engines, etc.

Once performance becomes the problem, then you can think about Vulkan/DX12.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#19

Post by junon »

tombert wrote: post #9
user____name wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Getting a triangle on the screen is the hello world of 3D applications. Many such guides for your backend of choice. From there it becomes learning how the shaders work, internalizing projection matrices (if you're doing 3D) which takes a bit of thinking, then slowly as you build up enough abstractions turns back into a more "normal" data structures problem surrounding whatever it is you're actually building. But it's broad, be prepared for that.

Definitely recommend starting with a more "batteries included" framework, then trying your hand at opengl, then Vulkan will at least make a bit more sense. SDL is a decent place to start.

A lot of the friction is due to the tooling and debugging, so learning how to do that earlier rather than later will be quite beneficial.

Re: How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)

#20

Post by foltik »

simonask wrote: post #7
tombert wrote: post #4

My 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…

Could you say more about which extensions you’re referring to? I’ve often heard this take, but found details vague and practical comparisons hard to find.
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