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)

Dispatching compute work

Apart from drawing, Vulkan can be used to perform general computations. For this purpose, we need to write compute shaders and execute them--this is called dispatching.
When we want to issue computational work to be performed, we need to specify how many separate compute shader instances should be executed and how they are divided into workgroups.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a command buffer and store it in a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer. Make sure the command buffer is in the recording state and no render pass is currently started.
  2. Store the number of local workgroups along the x dimension in a variable of type uint32_t named x_size.
  3. The number of local workgroups in the y dimensions should be stored in a...