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 desired usage scenarios of swapchain images

Images created with a swapchain are usually used as color attachments. This means that we want to render into them (use them as render targets). But we are not limited only to this scenario. We can use swapchain images for other purposes--we can sample from them, use them as a source of data in copy operations, or copy data into them. These are all different image usages and we can specify them during swapchain creation. But, again, we need to check whether these usages are supported.

How to do it...

  1. Acquire the capabilities of a presentation surface (refer to the Getting capabilities of a presentation surface recipe). Store them in a variable of type VkSurfaceCapabilitiesKHR named surface_capabilities.
  2. Choose...