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)

Introduction

Operations recorded in command buffers and submitted to queues are processed by the hardware. Processing is performed in a series of steps that form a pipeline. When we want to perform mathematical calculations, we use a compute pipeline. If we want to draw anything, we need a graphics pipeline.

Pipeline objects control the way in which geometry is drawn or computations are performed. They manage the behavior of the hardware on which our application is executed. And they are one of the biggest and most apparent differences between Vulkan and OpenGL. OpenGL used a state machine. It allowed us to change many rendering or computing parameters whenever we wanted. We could set up the state, activate a shader program, draw a geometry, then activate another shader program and draw another geometry. In Vulkan it is not possible because the whole rendering or computing state is stored in a single, monolithical...