vulkan-guide VS Vulkan-Docs

I totally agree, and so do the people working on it as well as some of the volunteers who write tutorials.

There's an ongoing effort to create beginner friendly introductory material which was discussed in the recent Vulkanised conference. And an effort to make a better documentation site that's easier to browse than the specification.

On the volunteer front, there's a Vulkan 1.3 -based introductory tutorial (work in progress) over at https://vkguide.dev/

I think there should be a Vulkan tutorial that doesn't start with the boring stuff of initialization and window creation. It's stuff that you write once and forget about, and nothing particularly interesting happens in it.

Looking at my hobby project, excluding the boring stuff (which is reusable), a "hello compute" example is around 100 LOC and a "hello triangle" around 120 LOC. GLSL shader sources included.

Maybe someday I'll get around to writing a "learn Vulkan the hard way" blog post with examples.

Also, use https://vkguide.dev/ rather than vulkan-tutorial.

Once you're beyond the "introductory" phase, resources become more specialized based on what you'd like to learn -- there are Vulkan tutorials like https://vkguide.dev/ which will teach you the API and also give a bit more insight in how modern GPU hardware is structured, there are books like the "GPU Zen" series that do deep-dives on specific techniques, and there are tons of recorded GDC and SIGGRAPH talks on interesting new techniques. :)

Personally, I'm a hands on learner who actually wants to use this stuff in my career, so I'd recommend these tutorials: https://learnopengl.com/ https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Overview https://vkguide.dev/

vkguide teaches some good practices regarding code/renderer structure, but I'm afraid it doesn't go as deep as you'd like. It's certainly deeper than most other tutorials, though.

https://vkguide.dev/ This is my favorite.

Pipelines (or in general terms PSOs) are the most problematic aspect of Vulkan / DX12 - much more than synchronization! Large parts of the gamedev industry seems to recognize all the performance issues with pipelines and therefore companies are experimenting with newer models like the VK_EXT_shader_object extension ("Vulkan without Pipelines": https://www.khronos.org/blog/you-can-use-vulkan-without-pipe...).

I've written a detailed comment about this before here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37843946#37845431) but for a much more comprehensive explanation by an engineer from Nintendo read the initial proposal for the VK_EXT_shader_object extension: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/propos...).

There's also Casey Muratori's mail to the Vulkan advisory on 2015 that basically predicts this whole clusterfuck would happen: https://github.com/cmuratori/misc/blob/main/vulkan_dynamic_s...

Apple -> MoltenVK is an emulation layer and doesn't give you as much control as using Metal directly.

Nintendo and Sony prefer their own APIs, NVN and LibGNM, and AIUI Vulkan is a second-class API on those platforms which does not offer as much power, it is widely understood studios use NVN and LibGNM to get access to the real hardware on those platforms.

Windows/AMD/NVidia/Intel -> HW manufacturers tend to prototype and release new features with D3D first and then 'backport' them to Vulkan after a while. DirectX 12 for example had mesh shaders for over 2 years before Vulkan got a vendor neutral extension for them[0]

Android and Linux are the only platform where Vulkan is a first-class citizen.

You could maybe argue Nvidia treats Vulkan as a first-class citizen because they tend to have vendor-specific Vulkan extensions for the latest features available before anyone else. But otherwise, no, Vulkan is not a first-class API anywhere except Linux and Android.

Graphics API wars are alive and well.

[0] https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/issues/1423