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)

Creating a Vulkan Instance with WSI extensions enabled

To be able to properly display images on screen, we need to enable a set of WSI extensions. They are divided into instance- and device-levels, depending on the functionality they introduce. The first step is to create a Vulkan Instance with a set of enabled extensions that allow us to create a presentation surface--a Vulkan representation of an application's window.

How to do it...

On the Windows operating systems family, perform the following steps:

  1. Prepare a variable of type VkInstance named instance.
  2. Prepare a variable of type std::vector<char const *> named desired_extensions. Store the names of all extensions you want to enable in the desired_extensions variable.
  3. Add another element to the desired_extensions...