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 format of swapchain images

The format defines the number of color components, the number of bits for each component, and the used data type. During swapchain creation, we must specify whether we want to use red, green, and blue channels with or without an alpha component, whether the color values should be encoded using unsigned integer or floating-point data types, and what their precision is. We must also choose whether we are encoding color values using linear or nonlinear color space. But as with other swapchain parameters, we can use only values that are supported by the presentation surface.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use several terms that may seem identical, but in fact they specify different parameters:

  • Image format is used to describe...