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)

Creating a shader module

The first step in creating a pipeline object is to prepare shader modules. They represent shaders and contain their code written in a SPIR-V assembly. A single module may contain code for multiple shader stages. When we write shader programs and convert them into SPIR-V form, we need to create a shader module (or multiple modules) before we can use shaders in our application.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device stored in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Load a binary SPIR-V assembly of a selected shader and store it in a variable of type std::vector<unsigned char> named source_code.
  3. Create a variable of type VkShaderModuleCreateInfo named shader_module_create_info. Use the following values to initialize...