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 view

Images are rarely used directly in Vulkan commands. Framebuffers and shaders (via descriptor sets) access images through image views. Image views define a selected part of an image's memory and specify additional information needed to properly read an image's data. That's why we need to know how to create an image view.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device and use it to initialize a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Use the handle of a created image to initialize a variable of type VkImage named image.
  3. Create a variable of type VkImageViewCreateInfo named image_view_create_info. Use the following values for its members:
    • VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_IMAGE_VIEW_CREATE_INFO value for sType
    • nullptr value for pNext...