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 descriptor set layout

Descriptor sets gather many resources (descriptors) in one object. They are later bound to a pipeline to establish an interface between our application and the shaders. But for the hardware to know what resources are grouped in a set, how many resources of each type there are, and what their order is, we need to create a descriptor set layout.

How to do it...

  1. Take the handle of a logical device and assign it to a variable of type VkDevice named logical_device.
  2. Create a vector variable with elements of type VkDescriptorSetLayoutBinding and call it bindings.
  3. For each resource you want to create and assign later to a given descriptor set, add an element to the bindings vector. Use the following values for members of each new element...