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)

Specifying pipeline dynamic states

Creating a graphics pipeline requires us to provide lots of parameters. What's more, once set, these parameters can't be changed. Such an approach was taken to improve the performance of our application and present a stable and predictable environment to the driver. But, unfortunately, it is also uncomfortable for developers as they may need to create many pipeline objects with almost identical states that differ only in small details.

To circumvent this problem, dynamic states were introduced. They allow us to control some of the pipeline's parameters dynamically by recording specific functions in command buffers. And in order to do that, we need to specify which parts of the pipeline are dynamic. This is done by specifying pipeline dynamic states.

How to...