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)

Introduction

In Vulkan, drawing commands are organized into render passes. A render pass is a collection of subpasses that describes how image resources (color, depth/stencil, and input attachments) are used: what their layouts are and how these layouts should be transitioned between subpasses, when we render into attachments or when we read data from them, if their contents are needed after the render pass, or if their usage is limited only to the scope of a render pass.

The aforementioned data stored in render passes is just a general description, or a metadata. The actual resources involved in the rendering process are specified with framebuffers. Through them, we define which image views are used for which rendering attachments.

We need to prepare all this information in advance, before we can issue (record) rendering commands. With that knowledge, drivers can greatly optimize the drawing process, limit the...