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)

Providing data to shaders through push constants

During drawing or dispatching computational work, specific shader stages are executed--the ones defined during the pipeline creation. So the shaders can perform their job, we need to provide data to them. Most of the time we use descriptor sets, as they allow us to provide kilobytes or even megabytes of data through buffers or images. But using them is quite complicated. And, what's more important, frequent changes of descriptor sets may impact the performance of our application. But sometimes, we need to provide a small amount of data in a fast and easy way. We can do this using push constants.

How to do it...

  1. Store the handle of a command buffer in a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer. Make...