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)

What you need for this book

This book explains various aspects of the Vulkan graphics API, which is open and multiplatform. It is available on Microsoft Windows (version 7 and newer) or Linux (preferably Ubuntu 16.04 or newer) systems. (Vulkan is also supported on Android devices with the 7.0+ / Nougat version of the operating system, but the code samples available with this book weren’t designed to be executed on the Android OS.)

To execute sample programs or to develop our own applications, apart from Windows 7+ or Linux operating systems, graphics hardware and drivers that support Vulkan API are also required. Refer to 3D graphics vendors’ sites and/or support to check which hardware is capable of running Vulkan‑enabled software.

When using the Windows operating system, code samples can be compiled using the Visual Studio Community 2015 IDE (or newer), which is free and available for everyone. To generate a solution for the Visual Studio IDE the CMAKE 3.0 or newer is required.

On Linux systems, compilation is performed using a combination of the CMAKE 3.0 and the make tool. But the samples can also be compiled using other tools such as QtCreator.