Hacker News Reader

But isn't teaching 'lowish-level graphics programming' the point of this book?

If you learn it with the fixed function pipeline it is actually harder to understand the low-level concepts. Simply consider the color issue: calling glColor once will set the color for all vertices that you are going to emit; the hardware, however, does not work like that. Shaders on the other hand make it clear how the pipeline works.

View on HN

* the hardware, however, does not work like that.*

Could you explain that?

On older fixed function hardware the fixed function pipeline mapped to hardware pretty directly. On modern GPUs most of the fixed function pipeline is emulated in drivers and shaders. So if you're doing "proper" low level graphics programming for modern GPUs you are writing shader code. Working with fixed function is writing for a low level abstraction that doesn't represent the way hardware actually works. It's true that using a 3D API at all is an abstraction that hides and simplifies many of the workings of the actual hardware, but modern APIs are much closer to actual hardware than legacy ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com