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 an image memory barrier

Images are created for various purposes--they are used as textures, by binding them to a pipeline via descriptor sets, as render targets, or as presentable images in swapchains. We can copy data to or from images--these are also separate usages defined during image creation.

Before we start using an image for any purpose, and every time we want to change the current usage of a given image, we need to inform a driver about this operation. We do this by using image memory barriers which are set during command buffer recording.

Getting ready

For the purpose of this recipe, a custom structure type ImageTransition is introduced. It has the following definition:

struct ImageTransition { 
  VkImage             Image; 
  VkAccessFlags    ...