OpenGL vs OGRE : Which is the best for beginner? [closed]

OpenGL! Yes I'm openly disagreeing with everyone on this board so far.

OGRE is a mess. The learning curve is steep. Yeah they've got some nice tutorials, but stepping outside the bounds of the tutorials and doing your own thing is VERY difficult. I'd expect to spend a three weeks before you can get OGRE set up and working, work through the tutorials, and figure out what to do next. There's nothing about OGRE that is THAT much better or simpler than OpenGL. If you are a good C programmer as you've claimed, and you understand your pointers/arrays/functions, OpenGL will be just as easy, if not easier.

That's why I strongly recommend starting with OpenGL. OpenGL will force you to learn all of the fundamentals of graphics. It's a lot more interesting as you'll actually come to realize what they heck is going on in the background. And YES start with NeHe's tutorials. Yeah they are 1.x which is very outdated (this is for you, Ranieri), but jumping into OpenGL 4.x is too steep a learning curve.

Start out with the immediate mode in 1.x (glBegin, glEnd), then learn about Vertex Arrays. If you want, play with display lists just to learn. Then move towards vertex buffer objects. Then learn about shaders. Each of these transitions are very easy, and there are plenty of great tutorials online. VBO's are in the core of 4.1, so by the time you make it there, you are no longer learning outdated material, and it's a lot easier to get there by starting with the 1.x stuff.

Also, if you ever want a game development career, nobody is going to hire you because you can make a cube spin in some off the shelf library. They are going to hire you because you understand what is going on at the lowest level possible and you can make design decisions based on that valuable knowledge.

References: I was where you were. I spent a month on OGRE, a week trying out Irrlicht, a week trying out Horde3d, two days playing with DirectX, and a month playing with OpenGL. After a month with OGRE I could barely go beyond the scope of the tutorials. After a month with OpenGL I had a character running around a minecraftian world, rendering 260,000 textured cubes per frame with 700+ framerate.

Short answer? OGRE.

Longish answer? OGRE is a wrapper over OpenGL, so therefore you have to do a lot less work. You do not have to worry so much about sending data to the GPU or binding shaders, or sorting out vertices at a low level. It is much faster to use OGRE than to use OpenGL for production, and chances are your code will be (very marginally) faster too.

If you're interested in engine development, use GL. Else, use OGRE. And I'd probably start with OGRE anyway.

Knowing computer graphics hardware is not needed for game development. It is needed to become graphics programmer or part of render dev team in a game company (Personal note: which is the best fun on whole game development :)).

If you dont wish to become render engineer, you propably don't need to learn whole openGL or DX to develop games.

I would argue neither is best for a beginner, but then "best" is a relative term that depends what exactly you are looking to gain. For example, if what you're wanting is to learn 3D graphics programming in order to gain skills that you could use to get a job as a 3D graphics programmer for a games company then those choices make sense. With this goal you might also look at DirectX.

If however you have any other goal in mind then I would recommend looking at other options. For starters, while from your question one would assume you want to be involved in game development as a programmer, you didn't actually specify that. Both writing a graphics engine in OpenGL and building on top of Ogre are definitely for hard-core programmers.