Book Image

Learning Vulkan

By : Parminder Singh
Book Image

Learning Vulkan

By: Parminder Singh

Overview of this book

Vulkan, the next generation graphics and compute API, is the latest offering by Khronos. This API is the successor of OpenGL and unlike OpenGL, it offers great flexibility and high performance capabilities to control modern GPU devices. With this book, you'll get great insights into the workings of Vulkan and how you can make stunning graphics run with minimum hardware requirements. We begin with a brief introduction to the Vulkan system and show you its distinct features with the successor to the OpenGL API. First, you will see how to establish a connection with hardware devices to query the available queues, memory types, and capabilities offered. Vulkan is verbose, so before diving deep into programing, you’ll get to grips with debugging techniques so even first-timers can overcome error traps using Vulkan’s layer and extension features. You’ll get a grip on command buffers and acquire the knowledge to record various operation commands into command buffer and submit it to a proper queue for GPU processing. We’ll take a detailed look at memory management and demonstrate the use of buffer and image resources to create drawing textures and image views for the presentation engine and vertex buffers to store geometry information. You'll get a brief overview of SPIR-V, the new way to manage shaders, and you'll define the drawing operations as a single unit of work in the Render pass with the help of attachments and subpasses. You'll also create frame buffers and build a solid graphics pipeline, as well as making use of the synchronizing mechanism to manage GPU and CPU hand-shaking. By the end, you’ll know everything you need to know to get your hands dirty with the coolest Graphics API on the block.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning Vulkan
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Understanding physical and logical devices


Vulkan divides the representation of a device into two forms known as the logical and physical device:

  • Physical device: A physical device represents a single workforce that may comprise a single GPU along with other hardware parts that work together to help the system accomplish the submitted jobs. On a very simple system, a physical device can be considered to represent the physical GPU unit.

  • Logical device: A logical device represents the application view of the actual device.

Physical devices

OpenGL does not expose physical devices; it connects them behind the curtains. Vulkan, on the other hand, exposes the system real computing device or GPU to the application. It allows the application to enumerate the physical devices available on the system.

Note

In this section, we will add a new user-defined class called VulkanDevice; this class is implemented in VulkanDevice.h/.cpp. It is responsible for managing the physical (VkPhysicalDevice) and logical...