Why I still teach OpenGL ES 3.0
5 points by Cloudef
5 points by Cloudef
Wow, I didn't know about the "After the Tutorial" conference talk. It's not shown on the Graphics Programming Conference YouTube channel (because it's a multi-collaborator upload? Thanks YouTube), so I missed it. But you can find it by copy-pasting the title into the search bar. Guess I've got a lot of talks to catch up on.
The Author probably knows this one already, but the talk "The Road to Vulkan: Teaching Modern Low-Level APIs in Introductory Graphics Courses" (Johannes Unterguggenberger, Eurographics 2022) feels relevant here.
Although since the "No Graphics API" blog post, I've been feeling kind of doomerish about teaching graphics APIs in the first place. Makes me reflect how much of the curriculum is ultimately software edifice vs actual substantial transferable GPU programming knowledge.
The article also did not talk about ANGLE which is what pretty much every browser uses to provide you WebGL. ANGLE keeps OpenGL ES 2.0/3.0 alive, so the code ends up translating to metal, directx, vulkan, etc ...
IMO, pretty much only graphics apis that matter are OpenGL ES 3.0 and Vulkan. Use former if you care about old hw, use latter if you care about modern rendering, apple support is provided by kosmickrisp / moltenvk. No Graphics API seems very interesting, but for now it seems like it will be implemented on top of existing graphics apis.