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)

Rendering a tessellated terrain

3D scenes with open worlds and long rendering distances usually also contain vast terrains. Drawing ground is a very complex topic and can be performed in many different ways. Terrain in a distance cannot be too complex, as it will take up too much memory and processing power to display it. On the other hand, the area near the player must be detailed enough to look convincing and natural. That's why we need a way to lower the number of details with increasing distance or to increase the terrain's fidelity near the camera.

This is an example of how the tessellation shaders can be used to achieve high quality rendered images. For a terrain, we can use a flat plane with low number of vertices. Using tessellation shaders, we can increase the number of primitives of the ground near the camera. We can then offset generated vertices by the desired amount to increase or decrease...