Vulkan™ Programming Guide

Chapter 6. Shaders and Pipelines

What You’ll Learn in This Chapter

• What a shader is and how it’s used

• The basics of SPIR-V, the Vulkan shading language

• How to construct a shader pipeline and use it to do work

Shaders are small programs that are executed directly on the device. These are the fundamental building blocks of any complex Vulkan program. Shaders are perhaps more important to the operation of your program than the Vulkan API itself. This chapter introduces shaders and shader modules, shows how they are constructed from SPIR-V binaries, and illustrates how those binaries are generated from GLSL using standard tools. It discusses the construction of pipelines containing those shaders and other information required to run them, ...