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)

Setting viewport states dynamically

The graphics pipeline defines parameters of lots of different states used during rendering. Creating separate pipeline objects every time we need to use slightly different values of some of these parameters would be cumbersome and very impractical. That's why dynamic states are available in Vulkan. We can define a viewport transformation to be one of them. In such a situation, we specify its parameters through a function call recorded in command buffers.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a command buffer that is in a recording state. Using its handle, initialize a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer.
  1. Specify the number of the first viewport whose parameters should be set. Store the number in a variable...