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)

Allocating command buffers

Command buffers are used to store (record) commands that are later submitted to queues, where they are executed and processed by the hardware to give us results. When we have created a command pool, we can use it to allocate command buffers.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a created logical device and store it in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Take the handle of a command pool and use it to initialize a variable of type VkCommandPool named command_pool.
  3. Create a variable of type VkCommandBufferAllocateInfo named command_buffer_allocate_info and use the following values for its members:
    • VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_COMMAND_BUFFER_ALLOCATE_INFO value for sType
    • nullptr value for pNext
    • command_pool variable for commandPool
    • VK_COMMAND_BUFFER_LEVEL_PRIMARY...