> Not sure if I’ll be able to do their new guide, my laptop can’t run some of the more recent versions of Vulkan
If your laptop got still GPU driver updates in 2022 or later, it should probably support Vulkan 1.3. You can install Vulkan SDK (or just extract the archive) and check your Vulkan version by running the supplied "vulkaninfo" program.
For example, my 5 year old Thinkpad T490 fully supports Vulkan 1.3 and it only has an iGPU! :)
You'll need 1k LOC to draw a single triangle and not 10-20k.
Sticking with OpenGL is understandable, but I can recommend learning some Vulkan as a side project (with the help of vkguide) without too much commitment. That's how I started and it turned out to be not as bad as I imagined! Uour mileage may vary, of course.
I know about two games which do very interesting stuff with modern GPU capabilities:
* Noita
* Teardown
They both do their physics on GPU which results in some impressive effects and the level of destruction/world interaction which wasn't seen anywhere before.
I can also recommend Arseny Kapoulkine
YouTube channel[1]. It can get a bit too advanced at times, but his channel was one of my motivators of getting into Vulkan programming.
Most of it is satire, but it's interesting that the position of "Chair of OpenGL" still exists to this day and a new person was assigned to it in 2024.
I guess libraries like bgfx, sokol and The Forge are kinda like that. But I just feel like it’s either all or nothing if you’re already doing your own game engine.
I’m okay with using middleware/3rd party libraries for things which I don’t care too much about (e.g. physics), but graphics is such a core component that I want to handle it myself.
In a way, OpenGL drivers were such middleware libraries written for you by GPU vendors (or open source community). But now they stopped doing that and now you’re either writing your own graphics abstraction layer or using someone else’s.
In this case, I choose the hard way. And it seemed to have worked out so far. I definitely won’t recommend it to everyone (especially if they want to make a game in less than a year!), but as a learning experience it was fun.
Yeah. Even though it might seem I’m 100% enjoying Vulkan, I still wish there was something closer to OpenGL and which was supported by GPU manufacturers. Other 3d party graphics frameworks are not bad, but you don’t feel the same confidence in their future in the same way as you did about OpenGL.
I can somewhat agree… I don’t dislike/fear Vulkan now, but I feel like there should have been something in-between OpenGL and Vulkan, because in most cases you don’t need the same level control over the GPU which AAA game require.
Thankfully, libraries like VMA and vk-bootstrap + new extensions like dynamic rendering make Vulkan start to resemble what “OpenGL Next” could have been. It’s still not perfect, but I’m glad that things have moved into that direction.
Agreed. I don’t even need all these fancy Vulkan features most of the time… Just validation layers and RenderDoc debugging make the whole experience of doing graphics programming so much more pleasant for me, compared to what I had to deal with in OpenGL.
I agree. I should probably clarify that in the article. It’s much easier to write “throwaway” code when you’re working alone and when you’re doing it just for fun.
This advice was probably aimed at people who tend to overthink things in these kinds of situations and spend years implementing things in the “right” way, which tends to slow them down considerably instead.
Vulkan initialization and basic swapchain management is very verbose, but things get much better after you do it for the first time and make some handy abstractions around pipeline creation/management later.
Indeed. I used as little CSS as I could because I love minimalist websites. And the lack of syntax highlighting was inspired by Go blog, for example. :)
Raw HTML definitely looks much uglier, sadly (“Reader mode” in most browsers makes websites without CSS easily readable, though!).
Thank you. The up-front complexity is still there and it might take quite a few days to see your first triangle. But I promise, everything will get much easier from that point. :)