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)

Writing vertex shaders

Vertex processing is a first graphics pipeline stage that can be programmed. Its main purpose is to convert positions of vertices, which form our geometry, from their local coordinate system into a coordinate system called a clip space. The clip coordinate system is used to allow graphics hardware to perform all following steps in a much easier and more optimal way. One of these steps is clipping, which clips processed vertices to only those that can be potentially visible, hence the name of the coordinate system. Apart from that, we can perform all the other operations, which are executed once per each vertex of drawn geometry.

How to do it...

  1. Create a text file. Select a name for the file, but use a vert extension for it (for example, shader...