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

Most modern graphics hardware platforms render images using programmable pipeline. 3D graphics data, such as vertices and fragments/pixels, are processed in a series of steps called stages. Some stages always perform the same operations, which we can only configure to a certain extent. However, there are other stages that need to be programmed. Small programs that control the behavior of these stages are called shaders.

In Vulkan, there are five programmable graphics pipeline stages--vertex, tessellation control, evaluation, geometry, and fragment. We can also write compute shader programs for a compute pipeline. In the core Vulkan API, we control these stages with programs written in a SPIR-V. It is an intermediate language that allows us to process graphics data and perform mathematical calculation on vectors, matrices, images, buffers, or samplers. The low-level nature of this language improves compilation...