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 descriptors with a texture and a uniform buffer

In this sample recipe, we will see how to create the most commonly used resources: a combined image sampler and a uniform buffer. We will prepare a descriptor set layout for them, create a descriptor pool, and allocate a descriptor set from it. Then we will update the allocated set with the created resources. This way, we can later bind the descriptor set to a command buffer and access resources in shaders.

How to do it...

  1. Create a combined image sampler (an image, image view, and a sampler) with the selected parameters--the most commonly used are VK_IMAGE_TYPE_2D image type, VK_FORMAT_R8G8B8A8_UNORM format, VK_IMAGE_VIEW_TYPE_2D view type, VK_IMAGE_ASPECT_COLOR_BIT aspect, VK_FILTER_LINEAR filter mode, and...