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 graphics pipeline with vertex and fragment shaders, depth test enabled, and with dynamic viewport and scissor tests

In this recipe, we will see how to create a commonly used graphics pipeline, in which vertex and fragment shaders are active and a depth test is enabled. We will also specify that viewport and scissor tests are set up dynamically.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device. Use it to initialize a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Take the SPIR-V assembly of a vertex shader and use it, along with the logical_device variable, to create a shader module. Store it in a variable of type VkShaderModule named vertex_shader_module (refer to the Creating a shader module recipe).
  3. Take the SPIR-V assembly of a fragment shader...