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 modern computer graphics, most of the rendering and processing of image data (such as vertices, pixels, or fragments) is done with a programmable pipeline and shaders. Shaders, to operate properly and to generate appropriate results, need to access additional data sources such as textures, samplers, buffers, or uniform variables. In Vulkan, these are provided through sets of descriptors.

Descriptors are opaque data structures that represent shader resources. They are organized into groups or sets and their contents are specified by descriptor set layouts. To provide resources to shaders, we bind descriptor sets to pipelines. We can bind multiple sets at once. To access resources from within shaders, we need to specify from which set and from which location within a set (called a binding) the given resource is acquired.

In this chapter, we will learn about the various descriptor types. We will see...