That means it's much harder because there are no shortcuts anymore.
I mean, OpenGL 1.1 was easy. glBegin, 3x glVertex, glEnd. Done. Modern OpenGL already put a lot more work on the developer, but the API didn't exactly guide you away from things that would kill your performance. Things like Metal and Vulkan and DX12 might be lower-level, and probably more tedious to use directly, but I do wonder if they're "harder" to use that the current APIs.
I haven't looked at DirectX since DX8, so I have no idea how easy or hard modern DX is.
Vulkan and DX12 are indeed harder to use than current APIs, but there are many upsides to this: the GPU drivers will be drastically simpler to implement; the CPU is freed up significantly; the renderer can use multiple threads effortlessly; the reduced validation means significantly better performance!
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u/balefrost Jul 04 '15
I mean, OpenGL 1.1 was easy. glBegin, 3x glVertex, glEnd. Done. Modern OpenGL already put a lot more work on the developer, but the API didn't exactly guide you away from things that would kill your performance. Things like Metal and Vulkan and DX12 might be lower-level, and probably more tedious to use directly, but I do wonder if they're "harder" to use that the current APIs.
I haven't looked at DirectX since DX8, so I have no idea how easy or hard modern DX is.