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 storage texel buffer

Storage texel buffers, like uniform texel buffers, are a way to provide large amount of image-like data to shaders. But they also allow us to store data in them and perform atomic operations on them. For this purpose, we need to create a buffer with a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_STORAGE_TEXEL_BUFFER_BIT.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a physical device. Store it in a variable of type VkPhysicalDevice named physical_device.
  2. Select a format for the texel buffer's data and use it to initialize a variable of type VkFormat named format.
  3. Create a variable of type VkFormatProperties named format_properties.
  4. Call vkGetPhysicalDeviceFormatProperties( physical_device, format, &format_properties ) and provide the handle of the selected physical...