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 tessellation control shaders

Tessellation is a process that divides geometry into much smaller parts. In graphics programming, it allows us to improve the number of details of rendered objects or to dynamically change their parameters, such as smoothness or shape, in much more flexible way.

Tessellation in Vulkan is optional. If enabled, it is performed after the vertex shader. It has three steps, of which two are programmable. The first programmable tessellation stage is used to set up parameters that control how the tessellation is performed. We do this by writing tessellation control shaders that specify values of tessellation factors.

How to do it...

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