A pipeline refers to a succession of fixed stages through which a data input flows; each stage processes the incoming data and hands it over to the next stage. The final product will be either a 2D raster drawing image (the graphics pipeline) or updated resources (buffers or images) with computational logic and calculations (the compute pipeline).
Vulkan supports two types of pipeline—graphics and compute.
The graphics pipeline: This pipeline takes in a set of Vulkan commands through command buffers and draws a 2D raster image of the 2D/3D scene.
The compute pipeline: This pipeline takes in Vulkan commands through command buffers and processes them for computational work.
The following redrawn diagram from the official Vulkan specification (https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.0/xhtml/vkspec.html#pipelines-block-diagram) shows the Vulkan graphics and compute pipelines:
The pipeline journey begins at Input Assembler, where the input vertex data is...