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 multiple graphics pipelines on multiple threads

The process of creating a graphics pipeline may take a (relatively) long time. Shader compilation takes place during the pipeline creation, the driver checks if compiled shaders can be properly linked together and if a state is properly specified for the shaders to work correctly. That's why, especially when we have lots of pipelines to create, it is good to split this process into multiple threads.

But when we have lots of pipelines to create, we should use a cache to speed up the creation even further. Here we will see how to use a cache for multiple concurrent pipeline creations and how to merge the cache afterwards.

Getting ready

In this recipe we use a custom template wrapper class of a VkDestroyer...