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)

Using push constants in shaders

When we provide data to shaders, we usually use uniform buffers, storage buffers, or other types of descriptor resources. Unfortunately, updating such resources may not be too convenient, especially when we need to provide data that changes frequently.

For this purpose, push constants were introduced. Through them we can provide data in a simplified and much faster way than by updating descriptor resources. However, we need to fit into a much smaller amount of available space.

Accessing push constants in GLSL shaders is similar to using uniform buffers.

How to do it...

  1. Create a shader file.
  2. Define a uniform block:
    1. Provide a push_constant layout qualifier:
      layout( push_constant )
    2. Use a uniform storage qualifier
    1. Provide a unique...