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 render pass

Rendering (drawing a geometry) can only be performed inside render passes. When we also want to perform other operations such as image postprocessing or preparing geometry and light prepass data, we need to order these operations into subpasses. For this, we specify descriptions of all the required attachments, all subpasses into which operations are grouped, and the necessary dependencies between those operations. When this data is prepared, we can create a render pass.

Getting ready

To lower the number of parameters that need to be provided, in this recipe, we use a custom structure of type SubpassParameters (refer to the Specifying subpass descriptions recipe).

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