Site with future Vulkan tutorials for beginners
learnvulkan.com
learnvulkan.com
I want Vulkan compute.
Although I haven't written a compute shader yet, compute in Vulkan looks trivial to use once you have waged your initial battles against the rendering pipeline setup. Most of the complexity with Vulkan lies in understanding descriptor sets, pipeline layouts and pipeline objects. I find that the Vulkan interface is remarkably consistent once you get over the initial - and substantial - hurdles.
From the article suggests at some point OpenCL is going to run on top of Vulkan.
Vulkan Compute shaders work in recent Android devices and on every Windows/Linux PC that has a <5 year old dedicated GPU. And for iOS/OSX there is an interop layer in the works that will enable Vulkan over Metal.
Actually no.
Vulkan is an optional API, so unless we are talking about Samsung and Google flagships phones, there is no guarantee of it being available.
So far Google hasn't even bothered to add it to the dashboards.
For compute, only Renderscript is required.
In compute you just dispatch kernels and put barriers to prevent race conditions. Pretty much like OpenCL Out Of Order queues except the arguments are passed via descriptor sets rather than given individually.
Would anyone still suggest learning OpenGL/building a graphics pipeline or just proceeding on to Kronos's Vulkan?
In my experience it is a pain point.
Any new concept or tool dependency, e.g. 3D editor or shader, is a pain point here since it increases project compexity superlinearly.
Also, many "game engines" which aim to speed up development impose a lot of constraints on client code. For example, they're not compatible with non-GL windows from same process or with external event loop. I made a mistake trying to use a few of those and impedance mismatch was really painful. Had to divest to plain OpenGL.
Realtime rendering is independent from game engine implementations and especially from content creation pipelines. If you are looking at resources that explain how to use game engines then you're looking in the wrong place. What you want is resources that teach how to write rendering code.
Vulkan isn't a higher level API though, which might be why you and the other guy are kind of talking past each other.
I've been playing with Monogame (used to be Microsoft's XNA) lately, which is cross-platform and very easy to get up and running with.
That's a particularly poor fit for 3D visualisation. No primitives, expectations of bringing your own shaders, inability to work with Forms in the same process...