Book description
Discover how to build impressive 3D graphics with the next-generation graphics API—Vulkan
About This Book
Get started with the Vulkan API and its programming techniques using the easy-to-follow examples to create stunning 3D graphics
Understand memory management in Vulkan and implement image and buffer resources
Get hands-on with the drawing process and synchronization, and render a 3D graphics scene with the Vulkan graphics pipeline
Who This Book Is For
This book is ideal for graphic programmers who want to get up and running with Vulkan. It’s also great for programmers who have experience with OpenGL and other graphic APIs who want to take advantage of next generation APIs. A good knowledge of C/C++ is expected.
What You Will Learn
Learn fundamentals of Vulkan programing model to harness the power of modern GPU devices.
Implement device, command buffer and queues to get connected with the physical hardware.
Explore various validation layers and learn how to use it for debugging Vulkan application.
Get a grip on memory management to control host and device memory operations.
Understand and implement buffer and image resource types in Vulkan.
Define drawing operations in the Render pass and implement graphics pipeline.
Manage GLSL shader using SPIR-V and update the shader resources with descriptor sets and push constants.
Learn the drawing process, manage resources with synchronization objects and render 3D scene output on screen with Swapchain.
Bring realism to your rendered 3D scene with textures, and implement linear and optimal textures
In Detail
Vulkan, the next generation graphics and compute API, is the latest offering by Khronos. This API is the successor of OpenGL and unlike OpenGL, it offers great flexibility and high performance capabilities to control modern GPU devices. With this book, you'll get great insights into the workings of Vulkan and how you can make stunning graphics run with minimum hardware requirements.
We begin with a brief introduction to the Vulkan system and show you its distinct features with the successor to the OpenGL API. First, you will see how to establish a connection with hardware devices to query the available queues, memory types, and capabilities offered. Vulkan is verbose, so before diving deep into programing, you’ll get to grips with debugging techniques so even first-timers can overcome error traps using Vulkan’s layer and extension features.
You’ll get a grip on command buffers and acquire the knowledge to record various operation commands into command buffer and submit it to a proper queue for GPU processing. We’ll take a detailed look at memory management and demonstrate the use of buffer and image resources to create drawing textures and image views for the presentation engine and vertex buffers to store geometry information.
You'll get a brief overview of SPIR-V, the new way to manage shaders, and you'll define the drawing operations as a single unit of work in the Render pass with the help of attachments and subpasses. You'll also create frame buffers and build a solid graphics pipeline, as well as making use of the synchronizing mechanism to manage GPU and CPU hand-shaking.
By the end, you’ll know everything you need to know to get your hands dirty with the coolest Graphics API on the block.
Style and approach
This book takes a practical approach to guide you through the Vulkan API, and you will get to build an application throughout the course of the book. Since you are expected to be familiar with C/C++, there is not much hand-holding throughout the course of the book.
Table of contents
-
Learning Vulkan
- Learning Vulkan
- Credits
- About the Author
- Acknowledgments
- About the Reviewer
- www.PacktPub.com
- Preface
- 1. Getting Started with the NextGen 3D Graphics API
-
2. Your First Vulkan Pseudo Program
- Installing Vulkan
-
The Hello World!!! pseudocode
- Initialization - a handshake with the device
- Swapchain initialization - querying the WSI extension
- Supplying shaders - shader compilation into SPIR-V
- Building layouts - descriptor and pipeline layouts
- Creating a Render Pass - defining a pass attribute
- Framebuffer - connect drawing images to the Render Pass
- Populating geometry - storing a vertex into GPU memory
- Pipeline state management - creating pipelines
- Executing the Render Pass - drawing Hello World!!!
- Queue submission and synchronization - sending jobs
- Displaying with presentation layer - rendering a triangle
- Fitting it all together
- Summary
- 3. Shaking Hands with the Device
- 4. Debugging in Vulkan
- 5. Command Buffer and Memory Management in Vulkan
-
6. Allocating Image Resources and Building a Swapchain with WSI
- Getting started with image resources
- Understanding image resources
- Memory allocation and binding image resources
-
Introducing swapchains
- Understanding the swapchain implementation flow
- The swapchain implementation's class block diagram
- Renderer - a window management custom class
- VulkanSwapChain - the swapchain manager
- Creating the surface with WSI and associating it with the created window
- The graphics queue with present support
- Querying swapchain image formats
- Creating the swapchain
- Creating a depth image
- Summarizing the application flow
- Summary
- 7. Buffer Resource, Render Pass, Framebuffer, and Shaders with SPIR-V
-
8. Pipelines and Pipeline State Management
- Getting started with pipelines
- Caching pipeline objects with a PCO
- Creating a graphics pipeline
- Understanding compute pipelines
- Pipeline State Objects (PSO) in Vulkan
- Implementing the pipeline
- Summary
-
9. Drawing Objects
- Overview of the drawing process in Vulkan
- Preparing the drawing object
- Rendering the drawing object
- Rendering an indexed geometry
- Understanding synchronization primitives in Vulkan
- Resizing the display window
- Summary
- 10. Descriptors and Push Constant
-
11. Drawing Textures
- Image resource - a quick recap
- Prerequisites for texture drawing
- Implementing the image resource with linear tiling
-
Implementing the image resource with optimal tiling
- Loading the image file
- Buffer object memory allocation and binding
- Populating the allocated device memory
- Creating the image object
- Image object memory allocation and binding
- Creating a command buffer object
- Setting the image layout
- Buffer to image copy
- Setting the optimal image layout
- Submitting the command buffer
- Creating an image sampler
- Creating the image view
- Copying data content between images and buffers
- Updating the descriptor set
- Summary
Product information
- Title: Learning Vulkan
- Author(s):
- Release date: December 2016
- Publisher(s): Packt Publishing
- ISBN: 9781786469809
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