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 depth bias states dynamically

When rasterization is enabled, each fragment that is generated during this process has its own coordinates (position on screen) and a depth value (distance from the camera). Depth value is used for the depth test, allowing for some opaque objects to cover other objects.

Enabling depth bias allows us to modify the fragment's calculated depth value. We can provide parameters for biasing a fragment's depth during the pipeline creation. But when depth bias is specified as one of the dynamic states, we do it through a function call.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a command buffer that is being recorded. Use the handle to initialize a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer.
  2. Store the value for the constant...