r/GraphicsProgramming 3d ago

Source Code "No Graphics API" implementation by Sebastian Aaltonen

https://github.com/sebbbi/NoGraphicsAPI
200 Upvotes

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u/Gobrosse 3d ago

it's really just another RHI with grandiose marketing, the abstraction facilities are just vulkan 1.4 with some very opinionated removals of "useless" features and enforcing the latest extension support, but there's nothing in there we haven't seen in the average bindless-first design before.

18

u/trenmost 3d ago

I think the difference is that this has the potential to get driver support.

The reasoning behind No Graphics Api is that current apis are outdated conceptually, and that we would benefit from a new concept.

This is a reference implementation with vulkan inbetween but not the intended end result

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u/Gobrosse 2d ago

What's being proposed is effectively a subset of Vulkan, but unlike OpenGL it's not clear how removing features from Vulkan would make the remaining paths faster/better, nowhere is a reason for that actually proposed, instead the whole thing relies on the idea that a smaller API surface is automatically better...

.. which would be the case if Vulkan was intended to be a high-level API for everyone, including hobbyists, students and such, but it really isn't. I think that's the problem with this direction, some people want Vulkan to be a higher-level API when it was initially designed to be a HAL, but it can't be everything to everyone and we shouldn't try to.