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)

Introduction

Lighting is one of the most important factors influencing the way we perceive everything that surrounds us. Most of the information our brains gather about the world comes from our eyes. Human sight is very sensitive to even the slightest change in lighting conditions. That's why lighting is also very important for creators of 3D applications, games, and movies.

In the times when 3D graphics libraries supported only a fixed-function pipeline, lighting calculations were performed according to a predefined set of rules--developers could only select colors for a light source and a lit object. This led most games and applications that used a given library to have a similar look and feel. The next step in the evolution of graphics hardware was the introduction of fragment shaders: their main purpose was to calculate the final color of a fragment (pixel). Fragment shaders literally shaded the geometry...