Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: 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

In Vulkan, there are two very important types of resources in which data can be stored--buffers and images. Buffers represent linear arrays of data. Images, similarly to OpenGL's textures, represent one-, two-, or three-dimensional data organized in a way that is (generally) specific for a given hardware (so we don't know the internal memory structure). Buffers and images can be used for various purposes: in shaders, we can read or sample data from them, or store data in them. Images can be used as color or depth/stencil attachments (render targets), which means that we can render into them. Buffers can also store vertex attributes, indices, or parameters used during indirect drawing.

What is very important is that each of the mentioned usages must be specified during resource creation (we can provide many of them at once). We also need to inform the driver when we change the way in which...