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 a Render Pass


A Render Pass tells us about the framebuffer attachments and subpasses that will be used while rendering. Attachments, such as color and depth, indicate how many color and depth images will be there. It specifies what should be the sample bits used to represent each of them and how the contents will be used in the rendering process. It also confirms how the contents would be treated at the beginning and end of each Render Pass instance. A Render Pass used in a command buffer is called a Render Pass instance. It manages the dependencies between the subpasses and defines the protocols on how the attachments should be used over the course of the subpasses.

A Render Pass consists of mainly two type of components: attachments and subpasses. The following are some facts about attachments and subpasses.

Attachments

An attachment refers to a surface region (such as color, depth/stencil, or resolve attachment to perform resolve operations) used at the time of rendering a...