[thegrim33]

SDL 3.0 introduced their GPU API a year or so ago, which is an abstraction layer on top of vulkan/others, might want to check it out.

Although after writing an entire engine with it, I ended up wanting more control, more perf, and to not be limited by the lowest common denominator limits of the various backends, and just ended up switching back to a Vulkan-based engine.

However, I took a lot of learnings from the SDL GPU code, such as their approach to synchronization, which was a pattern that solved a lot of problems for me in my Vulkan engine, and made things a lot easier/nicer to work with.

[ryandrake]

I'm working with SDL GPU now, and while it's nice, it hasn't quite cracked the cross platform nut yet. You still need to maintain and load platform-specific shaders for each incompatible ecosystem, or you need a set of "source of truth" HLSL shaders that your build system processes into platform-specific shaders, through a set of disparate tools that you have to download from all over the place, that really should be one tool. I have high hopes for SDL_shadercross to one day become that tool.

[shortrounddev2]

I thought shaders just needed to be compiled to spir-v

[HexDecOctBin]

SDL GPU is extremely disappointing in that it follows the Vulkan 1.0 model of static pipelines and rigid workflows. Using Vulkan 1.3 with a few extensions is actually far more ergonomic beyond a basic "Hello, World" than using SDL GPU.

[fulafel]

That might exclude a lot of your user base. For example a big chunk of Android users, or Linux workstation users in enterprise settings who are on older LTS distributions.

[on_the_train]

But sdl is super high level. If you want to do more than pong, you'll hit a wall very quickly.

I just want OpenGL, it was the perfect level of abstraction. I still use it today, both at work and for personal projects.

[59nadir]

For what it's worth my experience with Metal was that it was the closest any of the more modern APIs got to OpenGL. It's just stuck on an irrelevant OS. If they made sure you could use it on Windows & Linux I think it'd fill a pretty cool niche.

[beeflet]

I like OpenGL ES but the support for compute shaders sucks. I hate transform feedbacks. I am in the process of trying out WebGPU now, but it doesn't have good native support everywhere like OpenGL ES 3 does.

[bitwize]

OpenGL is designed-by-committee state-machine crap.

You don't know it yet, but what you really want is DirectX 9/10/11.

[thegrim33]

SDL GPU, not SDL. The GPU project is a generic wrapper/abstraction on top of the modern GPU APIs, such as Vulkan. You do all the same stuff as you would in a modern GPU API, except in a generic / slightly more accessible way.

[trzy]

In practice SDL is used to abstract away the system-dependent parts required to set up OpenGL.