Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Lapinski
Book Image

Vulkan Cookbook

By: 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)

Specifying a pipeline viewport and scissor test state

Drawing an object on screen requires us to specify the screen parameters. Creating a swapchain is not enough--we don't always need to draw to the entire available image area. There are situations in which we just want to draw a smaller picture in the whole image, such as the reflection in the back mirror of a car or half of the image in split-screen multiplayer games. We define the area of the image to which we want to draw through a pipeline viewport and scissor test states.

Getting ready

Specifying parameters for a viewport and scissor states requires us to provide a separate set of parameters for both the viewport and scissor test, but the number of elements in both sets must be equal. To keep parameters...