▶Book Description
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.
▶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
▶Key Features
- 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 this book covers
- Chapter 1, Getting Started with the NextGen 3D Graphics API, will begin with the fundamentals of the Vulkan API and provides an overview of all its distinct features compared to its predecessor OpenGL API. This chapter will cover the basics, concepts, application model, and technical jargon used in Vulkan programming that is extremely helpful for first-time learners. You will also walk through the Vulkan programming model and see an outline of each module and its role.
- Chapter 2, Your First Vulkan Pseudo Program, will help you program a simple Hello World program using a pseudocode approach. This will help the beginners to get a flavor of Vulkan programming and learn the step-by-step process to build their first Vulkan application. You will also learn how to install necessary software and the SDK.
- Chapter 3, Shaking Hands with the Device, will help you to set up the programming environment to start with building your very first Vulkan example. You will create the Vulkan instance and initialize the program. You will connect with the physical hardware device, explore different types of queues exposed by it, and query various available layers and extensions. This chapter will provide a detailed understanding of the device queue and queue family concept and its relation with logical devices.
- Chapter 4, Debugging in Vulkan, will describe how to perform debugging in a Vulkan application. Vulkan allows debugging through validation layers. In this chapter, we will discuss the role of each validation layer and program a simple example to understand the
debugging in action. In addition, we will also query the layer extensions to add extra features that may not be a part of the Vulkan specifications.
- Chapter 5, Command Buffer and Memory Management in Vulkan, will thoroughly discuss and implement command buffers in Vulkan. You will understand the role of the command pool and will learn how to record command buffers in Vulkan. The second half of the chapter
will cover memory management in Vulkan; you will dig through device memory, and learn methods to allocate or deallocate GPU memory and understand the mapping of CPU and GPU memory.
- Chapter 6, Allocating Image Resources and Building a Swapchain with WSI, will shed light on image resources and discuss memory management concepts, such as image creation, allocation, binding and mapping. Using this, we will create a depth image for depth testing.
This chapter will also introduce the WSI swapchain, which is used for presentation and renders the drawing output onscreen. We will acquire the swapchain color images and create image views that will be used for drawing primitives.
- Chapter 7, Buffer Resource, Render Pass, Frame Buffer, and Shaders with SPIR-V, will discuss the buffer resource and its usage for implementing the vertex buffer containing a drawing object’s geometry information. This chapter will give a detailed introduction to using the Render Pass to define a single unit of work specifying drawing operations using various attachments and subpasses. We will use Render Pass and implement frame buffers in Vulkan and demonstrate simple example to clear the background. As the chapter closes, we will implement our first shader in Vulkan using SPIR-V; we learn about SDK tools that convert GLSL into SPIR-V intermediate representation.
- Chapter 8, Pipelines and Pipeline State Management, will introduce Vulkan’s compute and graphics pipeline. This chapter will provide an overview of the graphic pipeline flow and cover the role of various modules from start to end. We will discuss pipeline state objects,
pipeline cache objects, and pipeline layouts. This chapter will cover all the pipeline states thoroughly, also covering dynamics states, input assembly with drawing primitives, rasterization, blending, viewport, depth/stencil testing, and multisampling. We will use these states' objects and implement the graphics pipeline.
- Chapter 9, Drawing Objects, will thoroughly cover the process of drawing objects in Vulkan. We will record and execute the drawing object command buffers. The recording associates the Render Pass, framebuffer, and pipeline together along with the viewport and geometry data. The command buffer execution involves the submission of the command buffer to the device queue and presenting the drawn swapchain image to the presentation engine. We will also discuss the Vulkan synchronization mechanisms and understand fences, semaphore, and memory barriers. In addition, we will also cover drawing APIs and demonstrate it through some easy-to-follow examples.
- Chapter 10, Descriptors and Push Constant, will describe how to update shader resources from a Vulkan application using descriptors and push constants. In descriptors, we will discuss and create descriptor pools and descriptor set layout. You will learn how to use the pipeline layouts and use the descriptors to update the buffer resource residing on the device memory and render the updated geometry on screen. Unlike descriptors, push constant do not use the command buffer and provides an optimized path to update the resources. You will implement a small example to understand push constants in action.
- Chapter 11, Drawing Textures, will bring realism to our rendered 3D drawing object by adding textures. You will learn how to create the image resource and apply samplers to it. You will also learn how to apply textures using linear and optimal tiling. In optimal tiling
implementation, you will learn to transfer buffer and image memory through staging.
