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 combined image sampler

From the application (API) perspective, samplers and sampled images are always separate objects. But inside shaders, they can be combined into one object. On some platforms, sampling from combined image samplers inside shaders may be more optimal than using separate samplers and sampled images.

How to do it...

  1. Create a sampler object and store its handle in a variable of type VkSampler named sampler (refer to the Creating a sampler recipe).
  2. Create a sampled image. Store the handle of the created image in a variable of type VkImage named sampled_image. Create an appropriate view for the sampled image and store its handle in a variable of type VkImageView named sampled_image_view (refer to the Creating a sampled image recipe).
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