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by gspr 5 days ago
Relatedly: could someone recommend a Vulkan introduction for people who don't "just want to make it work"? I understand the fact that Vulkan abstracts away a lot less of the rendering device than OpenGL does – that may be a strength or a weakness, but either way I'd like to understand. It seems a lot of introductions just skip over it all while apologizing for the boilerplate.

I think I once bookmarked an article which takes an interesting approach, namely doing all rendering with Vulkan compute! Does that ring a bell to anyone? I can't find it again. It seems very appealing to me. It may not be the best way to approach graphics, but I know a lot more about computations in general than I do graphics in particular. And knowing Vulkan Compute would help me in lots of ways, so it I can also use it for graphics that's a nice bonus.
1 comments
jplusequalt 5 days ago
>could someone recommend a Vulkan introduction for people who don't "just want to make it work"?

Khronos has a tutorial that walks you through getting a triangle on the screen, to rendering a glTF model, all the way up to how you go about making a simple engine.

But I'm not sure what you mean by "understand". If you want to understand the graphics theory, Vulkan tutorials aren't going to teach you that.

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gspr 5 days ago
> But I'm not sure what you mean by "understand". If you want to understand the graphics theory, Vulkan tutorials aren't going to teach you that.

I meant understand the Vulkan-specific minutiae of setting everything up for either graphics or compute. There's an order of magnitude or two more of it than for OpenGL, and lots of tutorials seem to skip it and focus on the graphics. I'd like to understand what all that setup does and why it's done a particular way.

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jplusequalt 4 days ago
>I'd like to understand what all that setup does and why it's done a particular way.

That's something you'll only understand after trying to build something non-trivial with an older graphics API like OpenGL.

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gspr 4 days ago
Nonsense. Man-made things can be explained by humans without needing to experience what came before.
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jplusequalt 3 days ago
Sure, it can be. Doesn't mean you'll take much away from it unless you're deeply familiar with the old ways of doing things.
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