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)

Acquiring a swapchain image

Before we can use a swapchain image, we need to ask a presentation engine for it. This process is called image acquisition. It returns an image's index into the array of images returned by the vkGetSwapchainImagesKHR() function as described in the Getting handles of swapchain images recipe.

Getting ready

To acquire an image in Vulkan, we need to specify one of two types of objects that haven't been described yet. These are semaphores and fences.

Semaphores are used to synchronize device's queues. It means that when we submit commands for processing, these commands may require another job to be finished. In such a situation, we can specify that these commands should wait for the other commands before they are executed. And...