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)

Clearing a color image

In traditional graphics APIs, we start rendering a frame by clearing a render target or a back buffer. In Vulkan, we should perform the clearing by specifying a VK_ATTACHMENT_LOAD_OP_CLEAR value for a loadOp member of the render pass's attachment description (refer to the Specifying attachment descriptions recipe from Chapter 6, Render Passes and Framebuffers). But sometimes, we can't clear an image inside a render pass and we need to do it implicitly.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a command buffer stored in a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer. Make sure the command buffer is in the recording state and no render pass has started.
  2. Take the handle of an image that should be cleared. Provide it through a variable...