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 an input attachment

Attachments are images into which we render during drawing commands, inside render passes. In other words, they are render targets.

Input attachments are image resources from which we can read (unfiltered) data inside fragment shaders. We just need to remember that we can access only one location corresponding to a processed fragment.

Usually, for input attachments, resources that were previously color or depth/stencil attachments are used. But we can also use other images (and their image views). We just need to create them with a VK_IMAGE_USAGE_INPUT_ATTACHMENT_BIT usage.

How to do it...

  1. Take the physical device on which operations are performed and store its handle in a variable of type VkPhysicalDevice named physical_device.
  2. Select...