points by MikeShah 2 days ago | 0 comments
I have found OpenGL 4.5/4.6 to be a sweet spot for students currently learning graphics in a semester course. SDL_GPU is otherwise a good intermediate I would consider.
I remember for myself: learning a new API (opengl), new paradigm (gpu programming), and new language(glsl) all on top of learning graphics concepts is a lot. OpenGL 4.5 and 4.6 are modern enough to get started and there are good resources to learn the 3.3+ stuff that I have built on.
See my website(mshah.io) for my paper on some of the 'why'.
My take is that older versions of GL feel nicer to teach to beginner programmers because they have so many specific functions to do each specific thing. You can have a lot of verbose, step-by-step instruction. But, much of what you have to convey is understanding of a convoluted interface to a hidden state machine. And, the one-step-at-a-time nature of the old interfaces build bad habits that don’t scale when you get serious.
With 4.6 we can get Direct State Access, Programmable Vertex Pulling and MultidrawIndirect. With that we can move the complexity from “lots of functions to manipulate a state machine” to a few functions that strongly resemble using malloc and memcpy to work with arrays of structs. That’s not trivial. But, it should be extremely familiar. It’s visible, flexible, scalable, and it sets you up to move on to Vulkan after you’ve learned the essentials of 3D rendering.