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 buffer

When we want to not only read data from a buffer inside shaders, but we would also like to store data in it, we need to use storage buffers. These are created with a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_STORAGE_BUFFER_BIT usage.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device and store it in a variable of type VkPhysicalDevice named physical_device.
  2. Create a variable of type VkBuffer named storage_buffer in which a handle of a created buffer will be stored.
  3. Create a buffer of a desired size and usage using the logical_device variable. Specified usage must contain at least a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_STORAGE_BUFFER_BIT flag. Store the created handle in the storage_buffer variable (refer to the Creating a buffer recipe from Chapter 4, Resources and Memory).
  4. Allocate...