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

APIs such as Vulkan can be used for many different purposes, such as mathematical and physical computations, image or video stream processing, and data visualizations. But the main purpose Vulkan was designed for and its most common usage is efficiently rendering 2D and 3D graphics. And when our application generates an image, we usually would like to display it on screen.

At first, it may seem surprising that the core of the Vulkan API doesn't allow for displaying generated images in the application's window. This is because Vulkan is a portable, cross-platform API but, unfortunately, there is no universal standard for presenting images on screen in different operating systems because they have drastically different architectures and standards.

That's why a set of extensions was introduced for the Vulkan API which allow us to present generated images in an application's window....