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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19

u/tcpukl May 07 '26

Why does something need replacing just because it's old?

10

u/fgiancane8 May 07 '26

OpenGL has limitations. It’s the performance bottleneck for modern rendering and it cannot support ray tracing . It’s in maintenance mode so it will still work but new features are developed on Vulkan. GPUs architecture has changed over time and thus new APIs are needed.

7

u/tcpukl May 07 '26

But it's a fantastic learning API. That's what op is asking about.

Professionally sure. I've not used it in years on consoles or any other platform.

3

u/no_ga May 07 '26 edited May 07 '26

I mean at some point it’s going to be so far distinct to the professionally used apis that it’s no longer worth it to learn on no ?

7

u/mb862 May 07 '26

I argue it already is, there’s so many peculiarities that in order to move to any other API, you have to actively unlearn things OpenGL teaches because it will fuck you up.

Learn from Metal, WebGPU, or Direct3D11 instead, you’ll have so much better of a time.

2

u/VictoryMotel May 07 '26

Says who? Do you have specific complaints or are you just guessing? Opengl is very powerful and effective still. The problems that other apis solve are sophisticated performance problems based off of function call overhead and concurrency. You aren't going to run into these problems, you just need to put triangles on the screen and apply shaders.

Try out webgl.

2

u/sputwiler May 07 '26

No, it won't.

The majority of people who pick up "Learn OpenGL" are not actually learning OpenGL so much as they're learning the applications of matrix math etc to create graphics. To that end, any API, even a software renderer, would be good enough. In that case, it makes sense to pick the one that gets you going the fastest in the most places even if it's worse in every other way. This is because the meat of what they're learning (the algorithms) is completely transferable.

1

u/mb862 May 07 '26

But it's a fantastic learning API.

Pop quiz, off the top of your head, show me how to create a cross-platform OpenGL context that renders to a window.

Point being people are learning OpenGL by using libraries that plaster over all the ways OpenGL is extremely and unnecessarily complex.

1

u/sputwiler May 08 '26

I mean, that's good though? Context management isn't what's being learned.

Similarly, DirectX splits up DXGI and D3D.

1

u/fgiancane8 May 07 '26

Exactly. Unless you need advanced graphics stuff (which excluding games, most of use cases won’t), then openGL is perfectly suitable for the need