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)

Recording a command buffer that draws a geometry with dynamic viewport and scissor states

Now we have all the knowledge required to draw images using the Vulkan API. In this sample recipe, we will aggregate some of the previous recipes and see how to use them to record a command buffer that displays a geometry.

Getting ready

To draw a geometry, we will use a custom structure type that has the following definition:

struct Mesh { 
  std::vector<float>    Data; 
  std::vector<uint32_t> VertexOffset; 
  std::vector<uint32_t> VertexCount; 
};

The Data member contains values for all the attributes of a given vertex, one vertex after another. For example, there are three components of position attribute, three components of a normal vector and two texture...