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 pipeline layout

Pipeline layouts are similar to descriptor set layouts. Descriptor set layouts are used to define what types of resources form a given descriptor set. Pipeline layouts define what types of resources can be accessed by a given pipeline. They are created from descriptor set layouts and, additionally, push constant ranges.

Pipeline layouts are needed for the pipeline creation as they specify the interface between shader stages and shader resources through a set, binding, array element address. The same address needs to be used in shaders (through a layout qualifier) so they can successfully access a given resource. But even if a given pipeline doesn't use any descriptor resources, we need to create a pipeline layout to inform the driver that no such interface is needed.

How to...