Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: Lapinski

Overview of this book

Vulkan is the next generation graphics API released by the Khronos group. It is expected to be the successor to OpenGL and OpenGL ES, which it shares some similarities with such as its cross-platform capabilities, programmed pipeline stages, or nomenclature. Vulkan is a low-level API that gives developers much more control over the hardware, but also adds new responsibilities such as explicit memory and resources management. With it, though, Vulkan is expected to be much faster. This book is your guide to understanding Vulkan through a series of recipes. We start off by teaching you how to create instances in Vulkan and choose the device on which operations will be performed. You will then explore more complex topics such as command buffers, resources and memory management, pipelines, GLSL shaders, render passes, and more. Gradually, the book moves on to teach you advanced rendering techniques, how to draw 3D scenes, and how to improve the performance of your applications. By the end of the book, you will be familiar with the latest advanced techniques implemented with the Vulkan API, which can be used on a wide range of platforms.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Introduction

In previous chapters, we have learned about the various aspects of the Vulkan API. We now know how to use the graphics library and how to create applications that render 3D images and perform mathematical calculations. But the sole knowledge about the Vulkan API may not be enough to generate more complicated scenes and to implement various rendering algorithms. There are several very useful operations that can aid us in creating, manipulating, and displaying 3D objects.

In this chapter, we will learn how to prepare transformation matrices that are used to move, rotate, and scale 3D meshes. We will also see how to generate projection matrices. Finally, we will use simple yet very powerful single-header libraries to load images and 3D models stored in files.