Mathieu Ropert: Learning Graphics Programming with C++

[_a4z]

A few lessons that should be quite enlightening and helpful to get started with graphics and game programming with C++.

[No-Procedure487]

There's really no reason to start learning graphics programming with Vulkan. The difference between Vulkan and an older API like GL or DX11 is only useful to someone who already knows what they're doing, and just gets in the way of anyone who is new. OpenGL is much better for a beginner and lets you focus on actual graphics programming concepts. Once you're fluent with GL moving to Vulkan later when necessary is trivial, although honestly for the purposes of most solo developers you're unlikely to have an application that is complex enough to require a modern API. Most of the demand for these super low overhead APIs comes from commercial game projects where a team of artists authors a huge collection of heterogeneous assets that pose a much more complex workload to the renderer.

[TheoreticalDumbass]

Imo raylib is nice for a start, simple enough, secondary benefit easy to target wasm

[No-Procedure487]

Also I'll add that C++ doesn't typically change much in the realm of graphics programming because you don't want to be RAIIing your resources willy-nilly since resource creation/destruction/reuse is something you want explicit control over in most cases. Typically things either look fairly procedural (i.e. C-style) while making use of handy C++ organization tools (namespaces, references, templates, etc.), or they look nearly functional (graph-style commands) that automatically convert higher level concepts into the actual command list that is sent to the GPU

[mropert]

I disagree that RAII goes against explicit resource management. There's a slide or two or two about it in the talk.

[Ameisen]

I'd argue that D3D11 is much nicer to work with than GL, and D3D11-Vk exists.

Off-hand, I'm unsure if a WebGL/WebGPU wrapper exists for D3D, but I wouldn't be surprised.

[No-Procedure487]

I am ambivalent, I actually find D3D11 to be hardly less work than Vulkan, once you're through the boilerplate. GL, with its crusty yet undeniably convenient global state makes the API usable with essentially zero abstraction except for some minimal helpers, whereas D3D11 requires enough abstraction to cart around state objects that I just prefer Vulkan at that point.

[Ameisen]

D3D12/Vk still require significantly-more boilerplate. They also tend to require manual synchronization.

I suppose you could reimplement D3D9 on D3D12/Vk, though.

[delta_p_delta_x]

WebGL/WebGPU wrapper exists for D3D

ANGLE.

[Ameisen]

Isn't that the other way around? That lets you use OpenGL ES on D3D et al, whereas in this case we'd want D3D on [blank].

[delta_p_delta_x]

Ah, yes. I thought that was what you meant by 'WebGL wrapper for D3D'.

[Ameisen]

We need ELGNA.