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)

Creating a buffer

Buffers are the simplest resources because they represent data which can be laid out in memory only linearly, just like in typical C/C++ arrays:

Buffers can be used for various purposes. They can be used in pipelines via descriptor sets to back data stores for uniform buffers, storage buffers, or texel buffers, among others. They can be a source of data for vertex indices or attributes, or can be used as staging resources--intermediate resources for data transfer from the CPU to the GPU. For all these purposes, we just need to create a buffer and specify its usage.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a created logical device stored in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Create a variable of type VkDeviceSize named size, in which...