Differences and similarities between OpenGL 4 and Vulkan

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Vulkan is unable to create any kind of rendering miracles when used instead of OpenGL, as the underlying hardware remains the same. However, there are a number of improvements in the management of the GPU.

Let’s take a look at some of the most visible points.

Technical similarities

These are a few technical similarities – things you may find familiar when switching from OpenGL to Vulkan:

• The framebuffer works quite similarly in Vulkan and OpenGL. You create a special object and attach one or more textures (images in Vulkan) to it, and the GPU renders the picture to it.
• If you use deferred rendering, a technique where different intermediate steps write their passes into buffers, this is similar to a Vulkan render pass and its subpasses.
• The shader stages of the GPU are the same. We are using only vertex and fragment shaders, but the remaining stages...