This is definitely true, but newer OpenGL gives you indirect rendering and bindless textures which is about as good as you can get even in Vulkan in terms of driver overhead.
Regardless, much like picking a programming language to learn, it doesn’t really matter what you start with. Most concepts transfer over and any graphics programmer will know more than one graphics API anyways.
It’s funny you mention PSOs because there is now an extension to not use them in Vulkan (VK_EXT_shader_object) because it turns out it’s not how the hardware works [1].
[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Docs/blob/main/propos...
Well sure, but as the other commenter pointed out, there's a lot of stuff you'd have to learn about how GPUs and 3D rendering with them actually works, before ever getting to concepts such as PSOs. Like think just the kind of thinking that you'd have to go through just to get a handle on things such as how shaders work, how to pack the data so that it can be efficiently used from the shader, uploading textures and so on. And for these kinds of things, OpenGL is as good a learning platform as any.
> Have they not stopped? The last major update to OpenGL was six years ago, around the time Vulkan went public. I recall there initially being talk of OpenGL continuing to be developed alongside Vulkan but that just hasn't happened.
That's what I'm saying tho. Khronos has stopped OpenGL development, which is a way more prescient and compelling reason to not use the API (aside from if you're targeting more "legacy" hardware that doesn't support Vulkan, like you might if you're developing a Wayland compositor, for example, where you might still like some 3D hardware acceleration to complement hardware planes), than the idea that because Apple doesn't support it, it shouldn't be used.
OpenGL was, after all, always a 2nd-class citizen on Apple. Even back in the OpenGL 3 days, Apple got stuck in OGL 2 for whatever reason.
Oh, and at least with Mesa's Zink[0], you can absolutely use OpenGL even if your hardware natively only support Vulkan. That's not a problem.
While this is true, for somebody who is starting from scratch there is a lot to learn before getting to the level at which thinking in terms of PSO is important, and it can be easier to get there via OpenGL, which btw still teaches you a decent chunk of GPU-friendly patterns (assuming of course we are talking about "modern" OpenGL and not display lists and such...). Also, with a good command of OpenGL, one can start trying to understand and re-implement rendering techniques spanning from deferred/forward+/clustered lighting, the various shadowing techniques and even HW raytracing eg. via the GLSL_NV_ray_tracingextension, which is - in my opinion - the more important side of learning GPU-accelerated rendering.
> Also, not everyone develops for Apple and so their deprecation is less compelling than, say, Khronos officially stopping development on the API ;)
Have they not stopped? The last major update to OpenGL was six years ago, around the time Vulkan went public. I recall there initially being talk of OpenGL continuing to be developed alongside Vulkan but that just hasn't happened.