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For a beginner, it's a frustrating process. OpenGL's primary way of letting you know you messed up is by giving you a blank screen.

This is much alleviated when you use a wrapper around OpenGL (e.g. Rust's `gfx`), but most people start with raw OpenGL.

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That doesn't change with Vulkan, screw up a transform/shader math/vertex format and you'll also end up with a blank screen.

Ironically there's a bunch more debuggers that work with OpenGL as opposed to Vulkan(or know how to debug you're way out of a blank screen by tweaking shaders/api calls to eliminate things).

The DirectX graphics debugger in Visual Studio is a godsend. It lets you analyze ever call and check every buffer for any "snapshot" of a frame you take.

Very easy to identify things like misaligned data, etc, that would be impossible to find otherwise.

(This feature broke on my desktop, though, and I still can't fix it for the life of me, but I'm past that point in my project development anyway.)

Yup, most mobile GPU vendors have similar things for Android and they're incredibly useful for debugging and profiling.

There's also RenderDoc available for Windows and Linux and maybe more, it's not great with OpenGL but excellent for debugging Vulkan and D3D11.

I know it doesn't work with OpenGL ES, but RenderDoc works well on regular OpenGL apps, from my experience.

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