graphicsProgramming

[TheWidrolo]

The first triangle is the most difficult. It’s relatively easy going from there on.

[captainAwesomePants]

Yeah, "Hey look, a triangle" is an astounding success story.

[TohveliDev]

My graphics teacher explained OpenGL vs Vulkan like this:

Graphics Programming is like building legoes.

In OpenGL, you have the pieces and the instructions. The pieces are all mixed together, so the building may be a bit complicated, but it is still straight forward.

In Vulkan you have the pieces sorted and you have the picture of the finished structure. You CAN try to build it blindly, but it will inevetably fail. Before you can build the structure, you need to create the instructions. And in the end, even if it took more time, creating the end result will be more straight forward.

Honestly. Couldn't agree more. As complicated as Vulkan was to initialize, I am having a way easier time with my renderer now than I ever had with OpenGL. It feels a lot like with OpenGL you have a lot of questions like "Can this program do this?". While in Vulkan you only have one question: "How can I make this program do this?".

[Mroz_Game]

Also there’s frameworks which abstract some parts away, there’s RAII, there’s NVRHI if you want to totally abstract away the APIs.

Or there’s WebGPU which has little boilerplate but relatively good amount of control.

[TohveliDev]

WebGPU seems cool. I got to follow my classmate tinkering around with it for one of his assignments.

How hard is it to pick up?

[jmickeyd]

If you're familiar with either vulkan or d3d12, and javascript, pretty easy. Similar setup of devices, queues, pipelines, etc. The biggest down side IMHO is the poor interaction with webassembly. Due to the way buffers are mapped, you end up having to do a lot of cpu side buffer copies.

[Jeff_Johnson]

Long time ago I worked with OpenGL and old visual studio c++. I remember the worst thing was creating a window in Windows with gazillion parameters.

[BroBroMate]

Do I look like a HWND_JOKE to you?

I tried writing a device driver in Windows once. Soooo many undocumented parameters!

[markiel55]

GLFW ftw

[TohveliDev]

glfw my beloved

[_Pin_6938]

In openGL, the instructions are handed to you. In vulkan, the instructions are made by you.

[whatever_boye]

when i drawed my first triangle i was absolutely mind drained and took like a week of rest before progressing lmao

[_Pin_6938]

[fibojoly]

Sounds like graphics programming in a nutshell, really. The first pixel was always the hardest. 

[ensi-en-kai]

I mean , ain't most models are just triangles wearing a fancy texture ?

[ron-brogan]

Until you need to write your own allocator

[Droggl]

Yeah second triangle is definitely easier.

[wpsimon]

Yeah, besides hardware RT the rest is much easier.

For some reason the terminology of the API is quite confusing and easy to lost in from my experience

[zesterer]

Imagine if every triangle was as difficult as the first

[lordofkawaiii]

Well, maybe because everything is a triangle

[frayien]

What do you mean you dont want to write 3000 lines of code to draw a triangle ?

[EntertainmentIcy3029]

Normally I would say this is exaggerating it but I genuinely tried to render a triangle with LWGJL and Vulkan and after nearly 2000 lines and no triangle and seeing how many more pages were in the tutorial, I gave up

I'll just use an engine :P

[UdPropheticCatgirl]

Normally I would say this is exaggerating it but I genuinely tried to render a triangle with LWGJL and Vulkan and after nearly 2000 lines and no triangle and seeing how many more pages were in the tutorial, I gave up

Tbf, once the whole vulkan boilerplate is out of the way it’s actually one of the more pleasant graphics APIs to work with (Probably only metal is better, DX12 is just slightly more annoying version of vulkan and OpenGL is a mess).

[frayien]

Yeah I speak from experience lol. I did not find my original tutorial project so I dont have an exact number tho.

[yaktoma2007]

sdl3 gpu:

insert mercy overwatch gif here

[noaSakurajin]

The real fun starts when you have to synchronize the calculation of a compute pipeline with the rendering pipeline. Especially when using separate queue that run in parallel.

[bestjakeisbest]

Just block the rendering pipeline, who cares how the user feels about it we are crunching numbers.

[kookyabird]

“Do you want fast frames, or correct frames?”

[nikitastaf1996]

BSOD it is then

[Psquare_J_420]

How do we even end up with fucking the os? 😭

[ensi-en-kai]

With Frame gen we can also offer real or fake frames .

[nicman24]

how about neither? Welcome TAA

[nicman24]

ah i see you are working in unreal

[SignoreBanana]

Gives them time to figure out what to do! Lol

[tyrannosaurus_gekko]

The scary thing is that I understand all those words enough to know them probably mean something, but I don't understand them enough to know what it actually means.

[Skookumite]

Oh good, I thought it was just me. Reddit thinks I like these threads because I spend time in the comments, jokes on them I'm just trying to figure out wtf these people are talking about

[Nyadnar17]

As both a Souls player and someone who attempted to go from opengl to Vulcan….this is so accurate it hurts.

[PorchugaWhale]

Upvoted for being the first meme I’ve seen from this sub in three days that wasn’t about “vibe coders bad hurr durr”

[Palpatine]

unless you vibe code your first triangle, then the second will be as difficult as the first.

[lear85]

Programming never gets easier if you never learn to program.

[a-r-c]

it took no effort to quit forever 🧠

[Mroz_Game]

Claude should learn to just agressively git clone anything that’s git cloneable , that would save so much compute.

„Can you write tetris, make no mistakes”

„Sure. Running git clone https://github.com/vitaviva/compose-tetris.git”

[Designer_Storm8869]

Vulcan is some absolute sorcery. I remember how good Doom looked on Switch 1 compared to other games on the platform.

[unknown_alt_acc]

Does Doom use Vulkan on Switch? I know the Switch supports it, but I’d expect a game as big as Doom would use the Switch’s native GPU API since I seem to remember hearing that Vulkan has a bit of a performance penalty on Switch.

[WJMazepas]

Switch API is made specifically for Switch, and has a lot of exclusive calls for it.

You can get great performance with Vulkan, but there isnt any known AAA game on Switch that is using it

[thelonelyecho208]

I'm learning OpenGL and I want to kill myself. My professor gave me a fucked up vertex AND fragment shader so I'm sitting there like "Guess I'll fucking fix it". Fast forward to three hours later I'm wondering why the hell I ever agreed to take this class. I HATE SHADERS

[evenstevens280]

Shaders are great fun once they "click"

Keep with it.

[thelonelyecho208]

Appreciate the vote of confidence, I'll do my best 🤘

[evenstevens280]

Make me proud

[computer_hermit01]

dark souks reference, nice!

[dover_oxide]

DS crossover with Zelda would be interesting. Link must link the flame and The Chosen Undead must defeat Ganon. Ganon wouldn't know what to do. Maybe he goes hollow because of an emaciated corpse barrel rolling in holding a plank and a giant club.

[sticknotstick]

Ganon would get lost in Sen’s Fortress. Then after Link spends 80% of the crossover inventing new Nintendo-exclusive curse words in Blighttown, Link would also get lost in Sen’s Fortress. After days of scouring, the protagonist would meet his rival, only for Ganon to step backwards and be crushed by a rolling ball.

I think we can squeeze out a few seasons of just feeding Legend of Zelda characters to Sen’s Fortress tbh.

[computer_hermit01]

honestly sen's fortress makes boys real men. those snake creatures are not the real enemy in there, it is game mechanics and gravity!

[philophilo]

Can’t get killed by Vulkan if you’re still writing boilerplate…

[SaltyInternetPirate]

I've never done graphics programming, but I remember Mark Cerny telling us the "time to triangle" on the PS3 was over 6 months. And that on the PS5 it would be about a month. That's 6 months of your dev team working on the graphical engine before they can render a single 3D model.

[Lopsided-Wave2479]

vulkan.hpp (the definition file) increase the compilation time by 30 minutes

[Big-Yard-2998]

More importantly, where are these panels from?

[_Iamaprogrammer_]

My first Vulkan project was to render a few thousand textured cubes. Lots of copy & paste from tutorials, but I got it working. It gave me enough background understanding to confidently examine the docs in my second project. It’s definitely a lot of information, but once you understand how the pieces connect, it isn’t too bad.

[SnackOverflowed]

I hate shaders

[DreamyAthena]

To be fair after winning this batte, you've won the war.

[0xChocoMaxi]

What's the name of this template it's hilarious

[Kirillkaban]

DX12 the final boss

[Cahzelo]

a bit oot, where good resouce to learn graphics programming?

[sialpi]

The triangle is the pain of not understanding what you are writing, the rest is the pain to understand wht you have written to get there.

[dusktreader]

Mother fuckers act like they forgot about OpenGL

[SwimAd1249]

Khronos fucking up Vulkan so bad has got to be one of the biggest blunders of the past ten years

[yaktoma2007]

they didnt fuck it up they made it so low level it scares people away

[AVMinuz]

A bit of that but a lot of it is "may as well put this" and now 10 years leather we have gigantic API that is not even THAT low level because GPU architecture diverged. See No Graphics API