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)

Copying data from an image to a buffer

In Vulkan, we can not only transfer data from a buffer to an image, but also the other way--we can copy data from an image to the buffer. It doesn't matter what the properties of memory objects bound to them are. But, the data copy operation is the only way to update a device-local memory which cannot be mapped.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a command buffer and store it in a variable of type VkCommandBuffer named command_buffer. Make sure the command buffer is already in a recording state (refer to the Beginning a command buffer recording operation recipe from Chapter 3, Command Buffers and Synchronization).
  2. Take an image from which data will be copied. Store its handle in a variable of type VkImage named source_image...