Table Of ContentLearning Vulkan
Discover how to build impressive 3D graphics with the next-
generation graphics API—Vulkan
Parminder Singh
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Learning Vulkan
Copyright © 2016 Packt Publishing
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First published: December 2016
Production reference: 1121216
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78646-980-9
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Credits
Author Copy Editor
Parminder Singh Gladson Monteiro
Reviewer Project Coordinator
Chris Forbes Ritika Manoj
Commissioning Editor Proofreader
Ashwin Nair Safis Editing
Acquisition Editors Indexer
Smeet Thakkar Rekha Nair
Aaron Lazar
Content Development Editor Production Coordinator
Sachin Karnani Aparna Bhagat
Technical Editor Graphics
Murtaza Tinwala Abhinash Sahu
About the Author
Parminder Singh is a computation graphics engineer with Blackmagic Design, Singapore.
He has been working and developing graphic applications in the fields of network
simulations, geo-modeling, navigation, automotive, infotainment systems, image
processing, and post-production for the past decade. His research interests include GPU
programming for scalable graphics and compute applications, porting, and performance
optimization techniques.
He is a Vulkan, Metal and OpenGL ES trainer and has also authored OpenGL ES 3.0
Cookbook, Packt. His hobbies include traveling, light cooking, and spending quality time
with his baby girl.
Feel free to connect Parminder at https://www.linkedin.com/in/parmindersingh18 or
you can reach him at http://openglescookbook.com.
Acknowledgments
I dedicate this to my sweet baby girl, Raskeerat, who was born at the same time as we
started this project. With a little baby onboard, it's challenging to write a book; I am grateful
to my beloved wife Gurpreet Kaur and my family for helping me deliver this project to the
community.
I extend my gratitude to Mr. Ulrich Kabatek and the entire graphics team of Continental
Automotive; every member of the team had something to offer me to scale my vision of
graphics. I am grateful to Blackmagic Design, who helped me extend my horizon to take
GPU programming to a whole new level. I express my regards to Mohit Sindhwani and the
whole of Quantum Invention's team. It was a great pleasure to work for them and also was
a wonderful learning experience.
I am highly indebted to Chris Forbes from Google; his expertise in the graphics domain has
raised the bar of this title. I am highly impressed with his reviews and the quality of work
he delivered. Chris reviewed this title inch-by-inch and helped us not only to improve the
contents but also our understanding of the concepts with his detailed explanation.
Last but not the least, I am thankful to the entire division of Packt, especially Sachin
Karnani, who constantly remained involved during the production of this title. Murtaza
Tinwala, who brilliantly exhibited his content management and technical skills during the
final stages. I'm really happy to have them work with me on this book.
About the Reviewer
Chris Forbes works as a software developer for Google, working on Vulkan validation
support and other ecosystem components. Previously he has been involved in
implementing OpenGL 3 and 4 support in open source graphics drivers for Linux
(www.mesa3d.org), as well as rebuilding classic strategy games to run on modern systems
(www.openra.net).
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Table of Contents
Preface
1
Chapter 1: Getting Started with the NextGen 3D Graphics API
8
Vulkan and its evolution 8
Vulkan versus OpenGL 10
Important jargons before we get started 12
Learning the fundamentals of Vulkan 13
Vulkan's execution model 13
Vulkan's queues 15
The object model 16
Object lifetime and command syntax 16
Error checking and validation 17
Understanding the Vulkan application 17
Driver 18
Application 18
WSI 18
SPIR-V 18
LunarG SDK 19
Getting started with the Vulkan programming model 19
Hardware initialization 20
Window presentation surfaces 21
Resource setup 22
Pipeline setup 25
Descriptor sets and descriptor pools 25
Shaders with SPIR-V 26
Pipeline management 26
Recording commands 27
Queue submission 29
Summary 30
Chapter 2: Your First Vulkan Pseudo Program
31
Installing Vulkan 31
The Hello World!!! pseudocode 32
Initialization – a handshake with the device 33
Swapchain initialization – querying the WSI extension 37
Command buffer initialization – allocating command buffers 40
Resource objects – managing images and buffers 40
Creating a presentation surface – creating a swapchain 42
Creating a depth image 44
Resource allocation – allocating and binding device memory 46
Supplying shaders – shader compilation into SPIR-V 47
Building layouts – descriptor and pipeline layouts 48
Creating a Render Pass – defining a pass attribute 50
Framebuffer – connect drawing images to the Render Pass 50
Populating geometry – storing a vertex into GPU memory 51
Pipeline state management – creating pipelines 55
Defining states 55
Creating a graphics pipeline 57
Executing the Render Pass – drawing Hello World!!! 58
Acquiring the drawing surface 58
Preparing the Render Pass control structure 59
Render Pass execution 59
Queue submission and synchronization – sending jobs 61
Displaying with presentation layer – rendering a triangle 62
Fitting it all together 63
Summary 64
Chapter 3: Shaking Hands with the Device
66
Getting started with the LunarG SDK 67
Setting up our first project with CMake 68
How to build the CMake file 73
Introduction to extensions 74
Querying layers and extensions 75
Creating a Vulkan instance 80
Enabling layers and extensions 84
Testing the enabled layers and extensions 86
Understanding physical and logical devices 88
Physical devices 88
Enumerating physical devices 90
Querying physical device extensions 91
Getting the properties of a physical device 92
Interrogating memory properties from the physical device 93
Logical device 93
Creating a logical device 94
Waiting on the host 95
Losing the device 96
Understanding queues and queue families 96
Querying queue families 97
Storing the graphics queue handle 99
Creating a queue 100
[ ii ]
