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 cache object

Creating a pipeline object is a complicated and time-consuming process from the driver's perspective. A pipeline object is not a simple wrapper for parameters set during the creation. It involves preparing the states of all programmable and fixed pipeline stages, setting an interface between shaders and descriptor resources, compiling and linking shader programs, and performing error checking (that is, checking if shaders are linked properly). Results of these operations may be stored in a cache. This cache can then be reused to speed up the creation of pipeline objects with similar properties. To be able to use a pipeline cache object, we first need to create it.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device and store...