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 storage image

Storage images allow us to load (unfiltered) data from images bound to pipelines. But, what's more important, they also allow us to store data from shaders in the images. Such images must be created with a VK_IMAGE_USAGE_STORAGE_BIT usage flag specified.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a physical device and store it in a variable of type VkPhysicalDevice named physical_device.
  2. Select a format that will be used for a storage image. Initialize a variable of type VkFormat named format with the selected format.
  1. Create a variable of type VkFormatProperties named format_properties.
  2. Call vkGetPhysicalDeviceFormatProperties( physical_device, format, &format_properties ) and provide the physical_device variable, the format variable...