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)

Mapping, updating and unmapping host-visible memory

For images and buffers that are used during rendering, it is recommended to bind a memory that is located on the graphics hardware (device-local memory). This gives us the best performance. But we can't access such memory directly, and we need to use intermediate (staging) resources which mediate the data transfer between a GPU (device) and a CPU (host).

Staging resources, on the other hand, need to use memory that is host-visible. To upload data to such memory, or to read data from it, we need to map it.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a created logical device and store it in a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Select a memory object that was allocated on a memory type with a VK_MEMORY_PROPERTY_HOST_VISIBLE_BIT...