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)

Selecting a desired presentation mode

The ability to display images on screen is one of the most important features of a Vulkan's swapchain--and, in fact, it's what a swapchain was designed for. In OpenGL, when we finished rendering to a back buffer, we just switched it with a front buffer and the rendered image was displayed on screen. We could only determine whether we wanted to display an image along with blanking intervals (if we wanted a v-sync to be enabled) or not.

In Vulkan, we are not limited to only one image (back buffer) to which we can render. And, instead of two (v-sync enabled or disabled), we can select one of more ways in which images are displayed on screen. This is called a presentation mode and we need to specify it during swapchain creation.

How to do it...

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