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 a 2D image and view

The most common image type that is used in many popular applications or games is typical 2D textures with four RGBA components and 32 bits per texel. To create such a resource in Vulkan, we need to create a 2D image and a proper image view.

How to do it...

  1. Take a handle of a logical device and use it to initialize a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Select the data format used in the image and initialize a variable of type VkFormat named format with the selected value.
  3. Choose the size of the image. Store it in a variable of type VkExtent2D named size.
  4. Choose the number of mipmap levels that should compose the image. Initialize a variable of type uint32_t named num_mipmaps with the selected number of mipmaps.
  5. Specify the...