The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1

Posted Dec 20, 2023 12:55 UTC (Wed) by Sesse (subscriber, #53779)
In reply to: The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1 by excors
Parent article: The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1

Creating a VAO, a VBO, some shaders and generally what you need to draw a triangle in modern OpenGL (4.6, core profile) is more like 100 lines. Not 1000.

AFAIU, Khronos intended for there to be some sort of middle layer for those who didn't want to use a full engine, but it never really materialized. The situation is pretty atrocious, and it means we can basically never kill OpenGL even though it doesn't get any new features.

The Linux graphics stack in a nutshell, part 1

Posted Dec 20, 2023 14:26 UTC (Wed) by pta2002 (guest, #168664) [Link]

I would say it has actually materialized now though, in the form of WebGPU! It's a much nicer abstraction over Vulkan (or DX12, or Metal, depending on the OS, which are basically the same as Vulkan capability-wise), and despite the name doesn't really have to be used from the web. Namely, you can use it from most programming languages and bind to the WebGPU engines from either Chromium (dawn, written in C++) or Firefox (wgpu, written in Rust), and it'll just... work, mostly everywhere.

WebGPU's API, from what people seem to say, is basically identical to Apple's Metal, which most people also seem to agree is the nicest of the three, and massively reduces the boilerplate.

Took a bit, but I think we finally do have the graphics API to rule them all now :)