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Cem Yuksel's lecture videos for Interactive Computer Graphics at the University of Utah are another free and fantastic resource. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLplnkTzzqsZS3R5DjmCQs...
by brasswood
I fear that in the future, opengl will be made obsolete and GPU vendors will stop supplying drivers for it, because it won't be worth it for them. Of course there are layers to be put on top of vulkan, but I don't know if they're reliable enough and can support 100% of opengl.
I would say that's one thing that the "stop killing games" movement would not see coming. I am not expert enough in graphics programming.
I am wary because lately, I realized I could not run blender 4.5 on a thinkpad from 2014, on windows, I had to use a 3.x version because that thinkpad has a chipset.
Generally in software, making things work for a long time doesn't generate profits, and it feels like opengl is getting a bit old already. I hope it won't happen and people can contradict me here.
by jokoon
At this point GL is an interface, implementations will come and go, but the interface refuses to die. It's still the simplest way to get started, and the browser (WebGL) demands portability for code written against the API.
Shaders used to not make any sense to me. The tutorial writes a simple expression and boom the screen is displaying all kinds of funky things.
Then I realized you're just writing code that executes on all pixels sequentially. That made it easier to understand
by BraveOPotato
I cannot imagine a field more rewarding than programming with opengl when you grew up playing games. I'm talking about hobbyist engine type of development. It is almost like therapy for any dev that does web/cloud stuff during a day job.
by mawadev
If you want to use the learned knowledge I would recommend to use something like Sokol [0] or use the SDL-GPU API [1]. While Sokol is more higher level both can be used. Otherwise learn opengl is a really good introduction.
[0] https://github.com/floooh/sokol [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU
by AyanamiKaine
If you really want to learn from first principles, I'd recommend writing a software renderer without any graphics API. If you're looking for a course, see [1]. Next up, extend the software renderer to render a 3D character model (an obj file will suffice) which [1] covers and animate that 3D model with skeletal animation all the while on the CPU. Use quake's md5mesh and md5anim files to render the skeletal animation from [2]. This just lays down a clear foundation of what a rendering pipeline looks like.
Then pick up something like Modern OpenGL and you'll easily intuit if you've put in the hard yards above, which parts of this pipeline are fixed and which are programmable on a hardware designed specifically to do 3D. It just so happens that the same is reusable for compute and there you go with all the D/ML jazz. After this, read up on the HW architecture of GPU's (the literature is sparse as these are vendor locked) but realtimhrendering books has chapters on it and you can find out why Vulkan, DX12, Metal are in vogue now and OpenGL has been deprecated.
[1] https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-progra...
by oumua_don17
The one and only Holy Bible of Graphics Programming. If you're starting to learn computer graphics, just study through the entire site and do the examples one by one. It doesn't matter one bit that it uses a slightly outdated API called OpenGL - you're supposed to learn how to render things first, not about some weird obscure hardware / driver details!
After you've learned it, you can start learning CUDA if you want to do some more low-level compute stuff on the GPU (sorry, but you should just buy an NVIDIA card, CUDA is just that good). Or if you actually want to just make things but want to use a nicer cross-platform graphics API than OpenGL, then I recommend SDL3. (Or use Metal if you want to make macOS exclusive apps - it's actually a quite nice API)
Vulkan or DX12 are currently flawed APIs that are unnecessarily complex and doesn't even match the performance characteristics of current-gen hardware anymore. (see the titular post: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api). However if you want a computer graphics career (either in the game industry or in other niche domains) having experience with these APIs will be beneficial since these are what many production apps are currently stuck with - though honestly the job market for graphics really suck nowadays. (The biggest sector was triple-A game companies with their own engines, but the game industry is imploding right now...)
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- Hacker News
- Cem Yuksel's lecture videos for Interactive Computer Graphics at the University of Utah are another free and fantastic resource. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLplnkTzzqsZS3R5DjmCQs...by brasswood
- I fear that in the future, opengl will be made obsolete and GPU vendors will stop supplying drivers for it, because it won't be worth it for them. Of course there are layers to be put on top of vulkan, but I don't know if they're reliable enough and can support 100% of opengl.
I would say that's one thing that the "stop killing games" movement would not see coming. I am not expert enough in graphics programming.
I am wary because lately, I realized I could not run blender 4.5 on a thinkpad from 2014, on windows, I had to use a 3.x version because that thinkpad has a chipset.
Generally in software, making things work for a long time doesn't generate profits, and it feels like opengl is getting a bit old already. I hope it won't happen and people can contradict me here.
by jokoon - At this point GL is an interface, implementations will come and go, but the interface refuses to die. It's still the simplest way to get started, and the browser (WebGL) demands portability for code written against the API.
- Shaders used to not make any sense to me. The tutorial writes a simple expression and boom the screen is displaying all kinds of funky things.
Then I realized you're just writing code that executes on all pixels sequentially. That made it easier to understand
by BraveOPotato - I cannot imagine a field more rewarding than programming with opengl when you grew up playing games. I'm talking about hobbyist engine type of development. It is almost like therapy for any dev that does web/cloud stuff during a day job.by mawadev
- If you want to use the learned knowledge I would recommend to use something like Sokol [0] or use the SDL-GPU API [1]. While Sokol is more higher level both can be used. Otherwise learn opengl is a really good introduction.
[0] https://github.com/floooh/sokol [1] https://wiki.libsdl.org/SDL3/CategoryGPU
by AyanamiKaine - If you really want to learn from first principles, I'd recommend writing a software renderer without any graphics API. If you're looking for a course, see [1]. Next up, extend the software renderer to render a 3D character model (an obj file will suffice) which [1] covers and animate that 3D model with skeletal animation all the while on the CPU. Use quake's md5mesh and md5anim files to render the skeletal animation from [2]. This just lays down a clear foundation of what a rendering pipeline looks like.
Then pick up something like Modern OpenGL and you'll easily intuit if you've put in the hard yards above, which parts of this pipeline are fixed and which are programmable on a hardware designed specifically to do 3D. It just so happens that the same is reusable for compute and there you go with all the D/ML jazz. After this, read up on the HW architecture of GPU's (the literature is sparse as these are vendor locked) but realtimhrendering books has chapters on it and you can find out why Vulkan, DX12, Metal are in vogue now and OpenGL has been deprecated.
[1] https://pikuma.com/courses/learn-3d-computer-graphics-progra...
by oumua_don17 - The one and only Holy Bible of Graphics Programming. If you're starting to learn computer graphics, just study through the entire site and do the examples one by one. It doesn't matter one bit that it uses a slightly outdated API called OpenGL - you're supposed to learn how to render things first, not about some weird obscure hardware / driver details!
After you've learned it, you can start learning CUDA if you want to do some more low-level compute stuff on the GPU (sorry, but you should just buy an NVIDIA card, CUDA is just that good). Or if you actually want to just make things but want to use a nicer cross-platform graphics API than OpenGL, then I recommend SDL3. (Or use Metal if you want to make macOS exclusive apps - it's actually a quite nice API)
Vulkan or DX12 are currently flawed APIs that are unnecessarily complex and doesn't even match the performance characteristics of current-gen hardware anymore. (see the titular post: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api). However if you want a computer graphics career (either in the game industry or in other niche domains) having experience with these APIs will be beneficial since these are what many production apps are currently stuck with - though honestly the job market for graphics really suck nowadays. (The biggest sector was triple-A game companies with their own engines, but the game industry is imploding right now...)