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 uniform buffer

In Vulkan, uniform variables used inside shaders cannot be placed in a global namespace. They can be defined only inside uniform buffers. For these, we need to create buffers with a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_UNIFORM_BUFFER_BIT usage.

How to do it...

  1. Take the created logical device and use its handle to initialize a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Create a variable of type VkBuffer named uniform_buffer. It will hold the handle of the created buffer.
  1. Create a buffer using a logical_device variable and specifying the desired size and usage. The latter must contain at least a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_UNIFORM_BUFFER_BIT flag. Store the handle of the buffer in the uniform_buffer variable (refer to the Creating a buffer recipe from Chapter 4, Resources...