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 logical device with WSI extensions enabled

When we have created an Instance with WSI extensions enabled and have found a queue family that supports image presentation, it is time to create a logical device with another extension enabled. A device-level WSI extension allows us to create a swapchain. This is a collection of images which are managed by the presentation engine. In order to use any of these images and to render into them, we need to acquire them. After we are done, we give it back to the presentation engine. This operation is called a presentation and it informs the driver that we want to show an image to the user (present or display it on screen). The presentation engine displays it according to the parameters defined during swapchain creation. And we can create it only on logical devices with an enabled swapchain extension.

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