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 a vertex shader that multiplies vertex position by a projection matrix

Transforming geometry from local to clip space is usually performed by the vertex shader, though any other vertex processing stage (tessellation or geometry) may accomplish this task. The transformation is done by specifying model, view, and projection matrices and providing them from the application to the shaders as three separate matrices, or as one, joined model-view-projection matrix (in short MVP). The most common and easy way is to use a uniform buffer through which we can provide such a matrix.

How to do it...

  1. Create a vertex shader in a text file called shader.vert (refer to the Writing vertex shaders recipe).
  2. Define an input variable (attribute) through which vertex positions...