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 compute shaders

Compute shaders are used, as the name suggests, for general mathematical calculations. They are executed in (local) groups of a defined, three-dimensional size, which may have access to a common set of data. At the same time, many local groups can be executed to generate results faster.

How to do it...

  1. Create a text file. Select a name for the file, but use a comp extension for it (for example, shader.comp).
  2. Insert #version 450 in the first line of the file.
  3. Using an input layout qualifier, define the size of the local workgroup:
layout( local_size_x = <x size>, local_size_y = <y size>, local_size_z = <z size> ) in;
  1. Define uniform variables that correspond to descriptor resources created in the application. To define...