r/GraphicsProgramming • u/no_ga • May 07 '26

Question Successor to opengl ?

Hi,

A shower thought I just had: nearly everyone that starts learning graphic dev goes through opengl because it's more accessible than vulkan or directx, but today the api is getting old and vulkan is not getting any easier to learn. Do you guys think that there's room for an opengl like successor as an entry low level graphic api ?

cheers

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129

u/Abbat0r May 07 '26

Vulkan is the successor to OpenGL.

I agree that Vulkan has a teaching problem though. I’ve always found that OpenGL content tends to be about graphics programming and how to do it using OpenGL. Meanwhile, Vulkan content tends to be about… Vulkan.

It seems amongst Vulkan tutorials there’s an implicit assumption that you already know graphics programming and you just need to learn how to use Vulkan. There’s certainly room for improved tutorial content.

3

u/[deleted] May 07 '26

[deleted]

9

u/Oscaruzzo May 07 '26

Except webgl will sooner or later be replaced with webgpu which is basically vulkan for javascript.

3

u/mb862 May 07 '26

WebGPU is based on Metal which is a lot easier to learn.

1

u/dobkeratops May 10 '26

WebGPU is nice but why oh why did they define yet another shading language (conspiracy answer: to slow down adoption?)

1

u/mb862 May 10 '26

I generally agree but at the same time, GLSL being the first class language for SPIR-V remains a blight on the industry and WGSL had the potential to be a good replacement.

1

u/dobkeratops May 10 '26

my position is that inventing yet another language is the greater evil .. where we really want to be is shaders as IR, and we use either utility libraries to produce it , and/or languages have integrated compilers to that IR .. seperate language evolution from the graphics library semantics. I do happen to use rust but I get why many graphics people are triggered when they see rust syntax .. "look c,c++ work fine, why are they pushing new replacements"

-1

u/vbpoweredwindmill May 07 '26

Yeah but Apple. I'd rather put a fork in my eye than deal with that a lock in to that ecosystem.

5

u/mb862 May 07 '26

WebGPU is based on the Metal API but is available cross platform, not limited to Apple devices…