Hi all,

First time poster here, although I've been reading posts here for quite a while. This place has been invaluable for learning graphics programming -- thanks for a great resource!

Right now, I'm working on a graphics abstraction layer for .NET which supports D3D11, Vulkan, and OpenGL at the moment. I have implemented most of my planned features already, and things are working well. Some remaining features that I am planning are Compute Shaders, and some flavor of read-write shader resources. At the moment, my shaders can just get simple read-only access to a uniform (or constant) buffer, a texture, or a sampler. Unfortunately, I'm having a tough time grasping the distinctions between all of the different kinds of read-write resources that are available. In D3D alone, there seem to be 5 or 6 different kinds of resources with similar but different characteristics. On top of that, I get the impression that some of them are more or less "obsoleted" by the newer kinds, and don't have much of a place in modern code. There seem to be a few pivots:

• The data source/destination (buffer or texture)
• Read-write or read-only
• Structured or unstructured (?)
• Ordered vs unordered (?)

These are just my observations based on a lot of MSDN and OpenGL doc reading. For my library, I'm not interested in exposing every possibility to the user -- just trying to find a good "middle-ground" that can be represented cleanly across API's which is good enough for common scenarios.

Can anyone give a sort of "overview" of the different options, and perhaps compare/contrast the concepts between Direct3D, OpenGL, and Vulkan? I'd also be very interested in hearing how other folks have abstracted these concepts in their libraries.