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

Low level APIs like Vulkan give us much more control over the hardware than higher level APIs similar to OpenGL. This control is achieved not only through resources we can create, manage, and operate on, but especially through communication and interaction with the hardware. The control Vulkan gives us is fine grained, because we explicitly specify which commands are sent to hardware, how and when. For this purpose command buffers have been introduced; these are one of the most important objects Vulkan API exposes to developers. They allow us to record operations and submit them to hardware, where they are processed or executed. And what's more important, we can record them in multiple threads, unlike in high level APIs like OpenGL, where not only are commands recorded in a single thread, but they are recorded implicitly by the driver and sent to hardware without any control from the developers...