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 compute pipeline

A compute pipeline is the second type of pipeline available in the Vulkan API. It is used for dispatching compute shaders, which can perform any mathematical operations. And as the compute pipeline is much simpler than the graphics pipeline, we create it by providing far fewer parameters.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device and initialize a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device with it.
  2. Create a variable of a bitfield type VkPipelineCreateFlags named additional_options. Initialize it with any combination of these additional pipeline creation options:
    • Disable optimization: specifies that the created pipeline won't be optimized, but the creation process may be faster
    • Allow derivatives: specifies that other...