Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Pawel Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: Pawel 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)

Loading texture data from a file

Texturing is a commonly used technique. It allows us to place an image on the surface of an object in a similar way to how we put wallpaper on walls. This way we don't need to increase the geometric complexity of a mesh, which would be both too complex for the hardware to process it, and would use too much memory. Texturing is simpler to handle and allows us to achieve better, more convincing results.

Textures can be generated procedurally (dynamically in code), but usually their contents are read from images or photos.

Getting ready

There are many different libraries allowing us to load contents of images. All of them have their own specific behaviors, usages, and licenses. In this recipe, we will use a stb_image library created...