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 texturing vertex and fragment shaders

Texturing is a common technique that significantly improves the quality of rendered images. It allows us to load an image and wrap it around the object like a wallpaper. It increases the memory usage, but saves the performance which would be wasted on processing much more complex geometry.

How to do it...

  1. Create a vertex shader in a text file called shader.vert (refer to the Writing vertex shaders recipe).
  2. Apart from the vertex position, define an additional input variable (attribute) in the vertex shader through which texture coordinates are provided from the application:
      layout( location = 1 ) in vec2 app_tex_coordinates;
  1. In the vertex shader, define an output (varying) variable through which texture coordinates...