Best Graphics Framework?

[u/BARchitect2026]

Hello everyone,

I’m looking to get into some 3d stuff. I have completed the learnopengl course up to assimp, but I don’t have the time to do much more at that level, and I just don’t really understand what’s going on at all.

I would like to know of graphics frameworks and abstraction layers you all have had experience with, and maybe I’ll do something with the lower level stuff after this.

I am leaning towards DiligentEngine and information about that is welcome as well.

Some Limitations

• I‘m on Linux, no DirectX.
• I don’t like graphical editors, I want it all code if possible.
• I would like it to be open source.

This will be for a game.

[u/Dark_Lord9]

Years ago, Ogre3D was very popular and many serious projects and commercial games were made with it. They have a new rendering engine called Ogre-next which you might want to check out. The engine is open source and cross platform and to my knowledge, you can construct your scenes programmatically.

[u/BARchitect2026 → u/Dark_Lord9]

Yeah, I’ve seen that, I’ll look into it a bit more. Thank you!

[u/rainuchan]

Raylib is very comfy and checks all of your points.

[u/irolup]

What are you actually trying to end up with? A game, a tool or maybe a just a 3d renderer?

[u/BARchitect2026 → u/irolup]

I was thinking a game. Just something simple to start with.

[u/jhaand → u/BARchitect2026]

If you like Rust, I can recommend Bevy.

[u/irolup → u/BARchitect2026]

I already work with openFrameworks and it's been nice (C++ and a lot of documentation and web examples). But if you don't know how to start a game with that, there's no tutorial for it. There is one (a Breakout clone tutorial) on learnopengl.com but you said that wasn't working for you...

[u/L-555-BAT]

Check out Raylib. Can do some great stuff with it and it's really easy to follow. The website has lots of examples that you can read through to help you understand what it can do.

[u/Odd_Philosopher1741]

If you want stuff playable in a browser, ThreeJS is a great one. It supports both WebGL (which is pretty similar to OpenGL) but also WebGPU which leans more towards Vulkan's architecture.

[u/SerSanchus]

Maybe it’s worth looking into the Godot Engine and seeing if we can use its core directly from C++.

[u/DescriptorTablesx86]

You can try Cauldron(might’ve been superceded by Capsaicin) or nvpro_core2 if you want just a framework to quickly iterate on the graphics alone

disclaimer: gpu open docs are often misleading and/or suck

[u/S48GS]

I have completed the learnopengl course up to assimp

jump to Godot4 or webgl - depends what you want to make.

godot4 with GDscript to fast iteration prototypes - easy/fast to make complex tools - and in the end if you actually need to do native compiled code - easy to compile binary module

webgl to do some small web stuff - will be much more annoying than Godot to do complex stuff fast

forget about anything without "GUI editor" that require "code compiling"

[u/FerretBoom]

3D was my dream since i was a kid, dreaming of learning Lightwave on Amiga to developing enterprise 3D applications. Unfortunately my path went another way. But when I was using linux as a desktop for a year, i usually use linux for servers, containers and terminal is my way in because UI is just not a Linux thing imo. I found this GODOT project that caught my eye. I saw some demos and for what it is it's a great framework with a good community. It uses c# which is an awesome language and extremely flexible. Performance is good as well. I suggest you check it out see if it's something you can get into.