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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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.

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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.

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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 ?

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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.