DSA OpenGL
The evolution of OpenGL basically goes like this: Immediate mode -> Modern OpenGL (3.0+) -> Direct State Access -> Vulkan.
As the APIs have progressed, progressively more control has been given to the programmer.
Direct State Access (DSA) provides a nice balance between verbosity and control. In particular, minimizing or eliminating the “state-machine” construct with DSA makes interacting with the GPU feel much more similar to native C++.
Early versions of OpenGL are limited in terms of the control the user has, but much new graphics APIs sucha as Vulkan can make getting started with graphics very intimidating and prototyping or experimenting with the GPU challenging.
The research I did resulted in applications that explore many of the ways in which DSA leads to a more elegant programming experience.
The featured images shows just a few examples of graphics techniques made easier with DSA. These include tessellation, an example of the Phong Illumination Model and a real time raytracer.
Tessellation example
Phong illumination example
Raytracer example