Im the author of vkguide.dev and i disagree. I wrote that tutorial specifically for people that have already gone through learnopengl and want to learn vulkan. The core problem with the modern apis is that they are so incredibly complicated that they will kill any newbie on the spot. When the student still doesnt really know what a mesh is, having them setup GPU side memory allocators and graphics compute pipelines is absurd.

Opengl meanwhile is significantly easier, and will give them the important terminology and math required to do graphics. Once the student has learned opengl and wrote a small renderer with a few basic techniques, moving to vulkan or DX12 will happen far more smoothly.

In particular, learnopengl explains a lot of basics like transformation coordinates, what a mesh is, and other similar "basic knowledge", while all vulkan and dx12 tutorials skip through that because they are meant for a much more experienced audience.

OpenGL is not obsolete and is totally fine for many use cases. Vulkan is way too complicated and cumbersome for many.

Even if OpenGL doesn't get new features what exists now will continue to work for decades.

Vulkan is garbage. It's completely needlessly overengineered. Like, you literally have to write 50 lines of code just to allocate GPU memory, which is a one-liner in other APIs like CUDA. These 50 lines include things like heap type shopping and usage flags, that are entirely pointless for modern desktop GPUs. I know there is VMA, but that is a poorly made bandaid over a badly designed API, and barely addresses one out of 100 UX issues with Vulkan. There is a reason so many are sticking with OpenGL. OpenGL is fairly bad, but at least it isn't Vulkan.

But I can agree with CUDA. CUDA is great, in a large part because it actually offers an easy to use API.

This advice is basically like a teenager wanting to play electric guitar to jam out a few rock tunes, but their parents insist on learning classical guitar instead because starting with the fundamentals is the only "real" way to become a great musician. Meanwhile the kid loses interest and moves on to something else.

Wonder how this opinion will age. Won't be surprised if in 10 years OpenGL will be more widely supported and used than Vulkan. It's the Lindy effect after all.

OpenGL is the only truly cross-platform graphics API out there. Vulkan isn't on Apple platforms, unless you use MoltenVK which implements it on top of Metal. Also I don't know why, but Windows games tend to use Direct3D even though afaik GPU drivers do implement Vulkan on Windows, so there must be a good reason for that.

It's also much easier to grasp than Vulkan, Metal, or Direct3D.

It's so much easier than Vulkan or writing shaders and the performance is more than good enough for a lot of applications.

I wonder if somebody has written a adapter layer to write old OpenGL and translate it on the fly to Vulkan?

In 2026: Yes yes, please please learn this if you're beginning computer graphics. This is basically the One and Only Holy Bible of graphics programming, and dealing with a slightly outdated and weird API doesn't make it worse even a teeny bit. You will never get the same quality of fundamental education material from any of the other tutorials (especially Vulkan ones, since most of them assume you already know the basics and delve straight into writing thousands of lines of code that doesn't even perform better than OpenGL). You need to first learn the really basic things like homogeneous coordinates, matrix transforms, vertex and fragment shaders, various shading models like Phong and PBR, multi-pass rendering, etc, before actually diving into lower-level details where you want to optimize things.

Vulkan and DX12 are currently flawed APIs that are unnecessarily complex and doesn't even match the performance characteristics of current-gen hardware (see the titular post: https://www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-graphics-api) - if you want to really learn the low-level details you should start diving into something like CUDA or get into graphics driver development (start by reading Mesa open source driver code - which you will then learn why Vulkan is flawed)

I still write games using OpenGL for the reasons described in the comments here. I've had very good results with it despite it being "old". It works on my MacBook, PC, and SteamDeck and it has yet to surprise me.

OpenGL works fine, I'm using it in my hobby game engine (shaders, not the old fixed-function OpenGL)

it also will run just fine on windows or Linux using Proton with no issues

if I had to learn Vulkan from scratch instead, that would have been a whole different animal...

Relatedly: could someone recommend a Vulkan introduction for people who don't "just want to make it work"? I understand the fact that Vulkan abstracts away a lot less of the rendering device than OpenGL does – that may be a strength or a weakness, but either way I'd like to understand. It seems a lot of introductions just skip over it all while apologizing for the boilerplate.

I think I once bookmarked an article which takes an interesting approach, namely doing all rendering with Vulkan compute! Does that ring a bell to anyone? I can't find it again. It seems very appealing to me. It may not be the best way to approach graphics, but I know a lot more about computations in general than I do graphics in particular. And knowing Vulkan Compute would help me in lots of ways, so it I can also use it for graphics that's a nice bonus.