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)

Binding vertex buffers

When we draw a geometry, we need to specify data for vertices. At the very least, vertex positions are required, but we can specify other attributes such as normal, tangent or bitangent vectors, colors, or texture coordinates. This data comes from buffers created with a vertex buffer usage. We need to bind these buffers to specified bindings before we can issue drawing commands.

Getting ready

In this recipe, a custom VertexBufferParameters type is introduced. It has the following definition:

struct VertexBufferParameters { 
  VkBuffer      Buffer; 
  VkDeviceSize  MemoryOffset; 
};

This type is used to specify the buffer's parameters: its handle (in the Buffer member) and an offset from the start of the buffer's memory from which...