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 layered 2D image with a CUBEMAP view

A quite common example of images used in 3D applications or games are CUBEMAPs, used for simulating an object reflecting its environment. For this purpose, we don't create a CUBEMAP image. We need to create a layered image and through image view, we tell the hardware that it should interpret its layers as six CUBEMAP faces.

How to do it...

  1. Take a handle of a logical device. Store it in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Choose the size of an image and remember it must be square. Save the image's dimensions in a variable of type uint32_t named size.
  3. Select the number of the image's mipmap levels. Initialize a variable of type uint32_t named num_mipmaps with the chosen number.
  4. Think about...