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alexvitkov

Vulkan has advantages over OpenGL even if you don't care about visual fidelity.

- No global state

- You can select which GPU you want to use at runtime

- OpenGL error handling is terrible

- Validation layers!!

- Cool official artwork

- Fantastic documentation

- You can upload data to the GPU asynchronously from a second thread in a sane way

- Fancy GPU features - Mesh shaders, RTX

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I will say that validation layers alone are worth it. Damn they are nice, so many bugs in my code has been found by them which saved a lot of time.

I switched from opengl b/c I was tired of staring at a black screen with no debugging information (sure...glGetError) when I tried to implement a non-trivial feature. After tons of work to learn vulkan and getting it up and running, I still think it was worth it.

Agreed. I don’t even need all these fancy Vulkan features most of the time… Just validation layers and RenderDoc debugging make the whole experience of doing graphics programming so much more pleasant for me, compared to what I had to deal with in OpenGL.

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