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)

Using a staging buffer to update an image with a device-local memory bound

Staging buffers can be used not only to transfer data between buffers, but also to and from an image. Here, we will show how to map a buffer's memory and copy its contents to a desired image.

How to do it...

  1. Create a staging buffer big enough to hold the entire data to be transferred. Specify a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_TRANSFER_SRC_BIT usage for the buffer and store its handle in a variable of type VkBuffer named staging_buffer. Allocate a memory object that supports the VK_MEMORY_PROPERTY_HOST_VISIBLE_BIT property and bind it to the staging buffer. Store the memory object's handle in a variable of type VkDeviceMemory named memory_object. Map the memory and update its contents with the data...