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)

Setting a buffer memory barrier

Buffers can be used for various purposes. For each buffer, we can upload data to it or copy data from it; we can bind a buffer to a pipeline via descriptor sets and use it inside shaders as a source of data, or we can store data in the buffer from within the shaders.

We must inform a driver about each such usage, not only during buffer creation, but also before the intended usage. When we have been using a buffer for one purpose and from now on we want to use it differently, we must tell the driver about a change in the buffer's usage. This is done through buffer memory barriers. They are set as part of the pipeline barriers during command buffer recording (refer to the Beginning a command buffer recording operation recipe from Chapter 3, Command Buffers and Synchronization).

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