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 a sampler

Samplers define a set of parameters that control how image data is loaded inside shaders (sampled). These parameters include address calculations (that is, wrapping or repeating), filtering (linear or nearest), or using mipmaps. To use samplers from within shaders, we first need to create them.

How to do it...

  1. Take a handle of a logical device and store it in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Create a variable of type VkSamplerCreateInfo named sampler_create_info and use the following values for its members:
    • VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_SAMPLER_CREATE_INFO value for sType
    • nullptr value for pNext
    • 0 value for flags
    • The desired magnification and minification filtering mode (VK_FILTER_NEAREST or VK_FILTER_LINEAR) for magFilter and minFilter
    • ...