11 hours ago, Hodgman said:My main points would be something like:
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Thank you so much! Really great info, clears up a lot!
Thanks everyone, you'll probably see me again when I screw something up 
Which API to learn first
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2 hours ago, Mike2343 said:@Hodgman - I would put a note besides GL support for MacOS. MacOS stopped supporting OpenGL back in version 4.2,which is over 5 years old now? Otherwise great summary.
On the flip side, if you happen to own a Mac, I'd put Metal right at the top of the list for ease of learning.
You get a pretty familiar-feeling setup for anyone with an OpenGL background, while easing into the lower-level stuff without all of the complications that Vulkan/DX12 layer in.
I think DX11 is a decent choice to start with. I've been (slowly) building game engines in my spare time. I started with DX11, then ported that project (partially) to DX12, and recently I've been messing with Vulkan. DX11 was definitely the easier one to work with and it's still very much relevant for coding games on Windows. DX12 and Vulkan require a LOT more code even to do simple things and can be daunting to start with. With DX11 (compared to DX12) there are also more books and tutorials online, so learning will be easier.
However, I do really like Vulkan, and I've found the API to be more clear as to what specifically you are doing with the code. So, in this sense, something like Vulkan can help you learn how GPUs work a little more than the older APIs that can hide a lot of details for you. I also find the Vulkan API to be more straight-forward and understandable, but this may be because I came in with experience from DirectX first. There are also a good amount of books and online resources for Vulkan (compared to DX12), so if you do want to try with the newer APIs, I would recommend Vulkan over DX12.
So, all in all, starting with DX11 is probably a good choice. It will be easier to get running, and you'll be building skills you can apply to other APIs if you decide to switch in the future. Definitely get Frank Luna's book, it's one of the most well written graphics programming books out there, and the included source code is a gold mine.
Will not be better to start with OpenGL/ES so you could support wider device range? But don't know exactly whats the OS target, I've recently started with Metal (on Mac) then later on I'll jump to OpenGL to support Linux, Older macs and maybe Windows (I'm playing with Swift, so this las platform will be a bit harder to support yet, but theres a long, long way to get to run my engine in mac even). This is just a pet project, but maybe instead of trying to learn an API you need first to understand all the concepts (I'm not an expert) but vertex, matrix, quaternions, shaders, etc then jump into the API because I've struggle a lot in the beginning with all those things when you need to implement, new things and they are complicated (even know I just understand only the principles of shaders and still learning the math behind the render engine).
But its mostly up to you, if your target is only Windows for now, yeah the D3D11 has a wider range of supported devices.
If your starting out, I don't think a wider device range is going to be that important. most of the time your using the os you feel most comfortable with to develop on and for, while your learning
A lot of people learn the basics of 3D graphics by learning the API's, so i would just jump into one of them honestly, he'll learn about all that stuff when he gets there. For example, to draw a triangle on the screen, you don't need to know how to multiply matrices or work with quaternions. You don't even need to know how to work with shaders right away, just copy the one line shader functions to start with. Not that some theory wouldn't make it a smoother ride or anything though.
I know it's already said, but i'd suggest starting with D3D11, It's a cleaner API in my opinion. Once you learn that you can easily learn OpenGL anyway, they have very similar concepts
I'm curious now about...
1- Whats the main difference (in performance in Windows) between OpenGL and D3D11?
2- Is Direct3D (11/12) similar to Metal API?
3- Is Vulkan similar to Metal API?
Edit: This is the first time I found a kinda good game engine video tutorial (is a playlist with 60 videos, they are quite old but OpenGL didn't change so much in the last years), don't know if it comes to the case but in case someone finds it useful, its on Java/OpenGL but is understandable. (Yeah the voice is a bit annoying but you get used to it)
Also if you want to check directly the repo of the tutorial https://github.com/BennyQBD/3DGameEngine
I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between opengl and d3d11 perfromance on windows. At least I've never noticed anything that stands out. I suppose you can precompile d3d shaders, but cannot precompile opengl shaders, so start up times could maybe be slightly improved. Also i'd say the code to set up is easier to do with d3d. You don't need to check all these specific features to see if they are supported like you need to in opengl (although you might just use a library that does all the checking for you). There's a lot of really old opengl resources out there for learning, so that's another check against starting with opengl in my opinion. with d3d, you just need to look for anything with d3d11, or d3d12, depending on what your trying to work with. The separation between newer and older iterations of d3d is more distinguished than the versions of opengl (and should you use the glut or glew or glu libraries for opengl? or should you use something else? or not use any of those?)
I don't know much about metal, but d3d12 is similar to vulkan in that they are both "closer to the metal". They make no assumptions as opengl and previous iterations of d3d do. This means more work for the app developer, but allows you write the graphics system so that it fits your particular app more specifically, which can get you major gains in performance if done right than if you were to use an API that tries to do more for you. I believe Metal is similar to vulkan and d3d12 in that way?
Just with a superficial reading about Vulkan and D3D12, seems that they objective is the same, so in the end the 3 of them (including Metal) do the things in a similar manner, so the API will looks familiar switching between them. So I don't see the point to learn D3D11, yeah you could get maybe quickly to get something done, but the market is moving to a newer API.
So I think you need to focus on one of those 3. At least if you don't target older graphic cards (I think, at least Vulkan, support graphic cards from 2012 and newer).
D3D12 and Vulkan are there for the graphics experts to be able to get the most out of their hardware. They're not for hobbyists who want to write a toy engine in their spare time. D3D11 and GL are still there for that. Metal, in my opinion, is somewhere in the middle between the two extremes, being lower level than GL, but higher than Vulkan.
Of course, if your goal is to understand how a graphics driver works and how the full graphics stack works, from CPU to GPU, then by all means go for D3D12 or Vulkan.
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