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)

Drawing a geometry

Drawing is the operation we usually want to perform using graphics APIs such as OpenGL or Vulkan. It sends the geometry (vertices) provided by the application through a vertex buffer down the graphics pipeline, where it is processed step by step by programmable shaders and fixed-function stages.
Drawing requires us to provide the number of vertices we would like to process (display). It also allows us to display multiple instances of the same geometry at once.

How to do it...

  1. Store the handle of a command buffer in a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer. Make sure the command buffer is currently being recorded and that the parameters of all the states used during rendering are already set in it (bound to it). Also, make sure that...