Beginners Guide to Vulkan

Oculus Tiny Room is linked, but Valve also has a pretty good minimal Vulkan + OpenVR example in the OpenVR SDK called hellovr_vulkan (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ValveSoftware&#x2F;openvr&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;samples&#x2F;hellovr_vulkan&#x2F;hellovr_vulkan_main.cpp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ValveSoftware&#x2F;openvr&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;samples&#x2F;...</a>).<p>On HN this might be attractive because people tend to complain about Windows only software, and all of Valve&#x27;s samples use SDL and in theory run on Mac OS X and Linux. The OpenVR example is a little bit more verbose, but it does have some extra functionality, like drawing render models (controllers) provided by the API.

&gt; It reminds me of a lot of the attitudes surrounding C++ when I was first learning it-- yes, it&#x27;s more lines of code, but that doesn&#x27;t mean it can&#x27;t be a fine place for a beginner to start learning.<p>Sure, but Vulkan really feels like another level of complexity. OpenGL is simple in comparison.

I clicked cause I thought it was about Star Trek. Always forget there&#x27;s a library with that name.

Can someone give me a non-graphical use-case for learning Vulkan or just GPU-based programming in general? I&#x27;ve heard of hardware acceleration. Is it something like writing your routines in a language like Vulkan and offloading the computation to the GPU?

For folks curious about WebGL in a Vulkan world, there&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KhronosGroup&#x2F;WebGLNext-Proposals&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;Obsidian-Mozilla" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;KhronosGroup&#x2F;WebGLNext-Proposals&#x2F;tree&#x2F;mas...</a> .

800 lines of code to render a triangle. OK.<p>I understand the need of being explicit, but why not include some reasonable defaults? When you need that last drop of performance, you could opt out of those defaults, but specifying everything by hand...<p>OK, OK, I understand. Perhaps Vulkan is a compiler target. It was never intended for someone to write Vulkan code by hand. Just code in some higher-level API or language and get everything compiled into low-level Vulkan calls. I surely hope so, for the sake of my sanity. Right? Right?