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 presentation surface

A presentation surface represents an application's window. It allows us to acquire the window's parameters, such as dimensions, supported color formats, required number of images, or presentation modes. It also allows us to check whether a given physical device is able to display an image in a given window.

That's why, in situations where we want to show an image on screen, we need to create a presentation surface first, as it will help us choose a physical device that suits our needs.

Getting ready

To create a presentation surface, we need to provide the parameters of an application's window. In order to do that, the window must have been already created. In this recipe, we will provide its parameters through a...