zlacker

>>BirAda+(OP)
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.

Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.

In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.

Sigh.

>>ChuckM+25
Like everything else, Khronos did not need help from Microsoft to mess up OpenGL, with its spaghetti soup and lack of tooling, that makes every graphics programming newbie start by hunting and building from scratch, the infrastructure to make a rendering engine.

Vulkan is just as bad into this regard, with complexity turned to eleven. No wonder people call it a GPU hardware abstraction API, not a graphics API.

And on the Web they couldn't have better idea than throw away all the existing GLSL, to replace it with a Rust inspired shading language.

>>pjmlp+a8
> No wonder people call it a GPU hardware abstraction API, not a graphics API.

The entire point of Vulkan is that it’s a hardware abstraction. It was invented to offer an API around low level hardware operations rather than the typical approach of graphics libraries which come from the opposite direction.

>>hnlmor+2R
And with it turned everyone into a device driver developer, no wonder it isn't taking off as much as desired, outside Android and GNU/Linux.

>>pjmlp+FV
Metal and DirectX12 (if I’m remembering my version numbers correctly) are very very similar to Vulkan so I’m not really sure what point you’re trying to make.

>>vlovic+801
I wouldn't put Metal next to DX12/Vulkan. I'd put Vulkan as the most low-level API, DX12 slightly above Vulkan (because of convenience features like commited resources, slightly simpler memory model), but Metal I'd put somewhere in the middle between OGL/DX11 and VK/DX12. Metal introduces many optimizations such as pipeline objects, but it requires much less micromanagement around memory and synchronization as VK/DX12 do.