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Comment by vblanco | Hacker News Reader

Im the author of vkguide.dev and i disagree. I wrote that tutorial specifically for people that have already gone through learnopengl and want to learn vulkan. The core problem with the modern apis is that they are so incredibly complicated that they will kill any newbie on the spot. When the student still doesnt really know what a mesh is, having them setup GPU side memory allocators and graphics compute pipelines is absurd.

Opengl meanwhile is significantly easier, and will give them the important terminology and math required to do graphics. Once the student has learned opengl and wrote a small renderer with a few basic techniques, moving to vulkan or DX12 will happen far more smoothly.

In particular, learnopengl explains a lot of basics like transformation coordinates, what a mesh is, and other similar "basic knowledge", while all vulkan and dx12 tutorials skip through that because they are meant for a much more experienced audience.

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The problem with most modern "how to learn graphics programming" guides is that they over index on "low level GPU programming" and under index on important foundational 3D graphics concepts. Transformations and coordinate systems, model space, world space, view space, clip space, normalized device coordinates, screen space, concepts like parallel vs. perspective projection, viewport and viewport transformation, colors, lighting, materials, reflection, blending, antialiasing, texture mapping, various buffer types, tessellation...

You want to start with OpenGL because the API is organized roughly around these high level concepts. Starting with something like Vulkan means you're dropped straight into hundreds of lines of low level boilerplate setting up VkCommandBuffers and VkRenderPasses and VkPipelines and shaders, and all this GPU programming, and it's all just bewildering if you're used to thinking about things at the high level first, or just want to draw a fucking triangle on the screen.

> The core problem with the modern apis is that they are so incredibly complicated that they will kill any newbie on the spot.

I would agree if by modern you mean DX12 or Vulkan, but WebGPU (and maybe even Metal) are quite decent.

WebGPU has the issue that feature/capability-wise it is essentially 5 years behind OpenGL 4.6, which came out 8 years ago. And the other downside being that it adopted old Vulkan concepts that even Vulkan started to ditch, like render passes and static pipelines.

Without any sort of proper debugging tools.

For beginners that's irrelevant. WebGPU has more than enough features for beginners to learn about graphics programming. Not just that, once you're used to WebGPU, going to Vulkan will be much easier than the transition from OpenGL.

I wouldnt recommend anyone going to Vulkan, though. It's pretty much the worst graphics API out there, and WebGPU is mimicking outdated Vulkan design decisions that even Vulkan is currently outphasing, like render passes and static pipelines.

Webgpu is the worst of both worlds. Significantly more complicated than opengl yet not capable of many "essential" modern techniques like bindless resources.

If you must use a modern api to learn for whatever reason, go with vulkan and use dynamic rendering and buffer device addressing.

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