Sign In Start Free Trial
Account

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Vulkan Cookbook
  • Toc
  • feedback
Vulkan Cookbook

Vulkan Cookbook

By : Lapinski
2.9 (19)
close
Vulkan Cookbook

Vulkan Cookbook

2.9 (19)
By: 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)
close

Preface

Computer graphics have a very long and interesting history. Many APIs or custom approaches to the generation of 2D or 3D images have come and gone. A landmark in this history was the invention of OpenGL, one of the first graphics libraries, which allowed us to create real‑time, high-performance 3D graphics, and which was available for everyone on multiple operating systems. It is still developed and widely used even today. And this year we can celebrate its 25th birthday!

But many things have changed since OpenGL was created. The graphics hardware industry is evolving very quickly. And recently, to accommodate these changes, a new approach to 3D graphics rendering was presented. It took the form of a low‑level access to the graphics hardware. OpenGL was designed as a high-level API, which allows users to easily render images on screen. But this high‑level approach, convenient for users, is difficult for graphics drivers to handle. This is one of the main reasons for restricting the hardware to show its full potential. The new approach tries to overcome these struggles–it gives users much more control over the hardware, but also many more responsibilities. This way application developers can release the full potential of the graphics hardware, because the drivers no longer block them. Low‑level access allows drivers to be much smaller, much thinner. But these benefits come at the expense of much more work that needs to done by the developers.

The first evangelist of the new approach to graphics rendering was a Mantle API designed by AMD. When it proved that low‑level access can give considerable performance benefits, other companies started working on their own graphics libraries. One of the most notable representatives of the new trend were Metal API, designed by Apple, and DirectX 12, developed by Microsoft.

But all of the above libraries were developed with specific operating systems and/or hardware in mind. There was no open and multiplatform standard such as OpenGL. Until last year. Year 2016 saw the release of the Vulkan API, developed by Khronos consortium, which maintains the OpenGL library. Vulkan also represents the new approach, a low‑level access to the graphics hardware, but unlike the other libraries it is available for everyone on multiple operating systems and hardware platforms–from high‑performance desktop computers with Windows or Linux operating systems, to mobile devices with Android OS. And as it is still being very new, there are few resources teaching developers how to use it. This book tries to fill this gap.

bookmark search playlist download font-size

Change the font size

margin-width

Change margin width

day-mode

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected

Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Delete Bookmark

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete