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 an index buffer

To draw a geometry, we can provide the list of vertices (and their attributes) in two ways. The first way is a typical list, in which vertices are read one after another. The second method requires us to provide additional indices that indicate which vertices should be read to form polygons. This feature is known as indexed drawing. It allows us to reduce the memory consumption as we don't need to specify the same vertices multiple times. It is especially important when we have multiple attributes associated with each vertex, and when each such vertex is used across many polygons.

Indices are stored in a buffer called an index buffer, which must be bound before we can draw an indexed geometry.

How to do it...

  1. Store the command buffer...