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)

Creating an image

Images represent data that can have one, two, or three dimensions, and can have additional mipmap levels and layers. Each element of an image's data (a texel) can also have one or more samples.

Images can be used for many different purposes. We can use them as a source of data for copy operations. We can bind images to pipelines via descriptor sets and use them as textures (similarly to OpenGL). We can render into images, in which case we use images as color or depth attachments (render targets).

We specify image parameters such as size, format, and its intended usages during image creation.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device on which we want to create an image. Store it in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device...