OpenGL

OpenGL is a graphics API that was initially created by Silicon Graphics in 1992 for their 3D workstations. OpenGL is a specification this means the manufacture of your graphics driver has taken the liberty to write the code for OpenGL.
OpenGL is a state machine API, this is expressed through functions such as glBindBuffers(), glUseProgram().

OpenGL has been used in popular game engines such as Unity.

However, nowadays OpenGL has been deprecated on many systems in favor for Vulkan, a more verbose graphics API.

tldr; OpenGL shows cool ass graphics

This renderer has a OpenGL rendering backend.

by xff December 08, 2021

Vulkan

Vulkan is a new platform-independent graphics API which is more verbose, explicit and designed to have low overhead . It is generally considered to be faster than other graphics APIs such as OpenGL, because Vulkan is new it is generally not supported on older systems. Vulkan is created by Khronos Group and is influenced by the Manite by AMD.

OpenGL vs Vulkan:
1. OpenGL has two APIs for mobile and desktop development, Vulkan has an unified API for both.
2. Precompiled shaders, OpenGL uses GLSL for shaders, which forces the OpenGL driver to implement a compiler for GLSL. Vulkan drivers only consumes pre-compiled shaders.
3. OpenGL has a single global state machine whilst Vulkan is object based and does not have a state machine.

1. Just recently started learning Vulkan.. phew, it's hard.
2. Stay strong! It is the future!

by xff December 08, 2021