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)

Displaying polygon normals with a geometry shader

When rendering a geometry, we usually provide multiple attributes for each vertex--positions to draw the model, texture coordinates for texturing, and normal vectors for lighting calculation. Checking if all this data is correct may not be easy, but sometimes, when our rendering technique doesn't work as expected, it may be necessary.

In graphics programming, there are some debugging methods that are commonly used. Texture coordinates, which are usually two-dimensional, are displayed instead of the usual color. We can do the same with the normal vectors, but as they are three-dimensional, we can also display them in a form of lines. For this purpose, a geometry shader may be used.

How to do it...

  1. Create a vertex...