This section contains examples of basic Vulkan features. These examples aim to understand the use of Vulkan objects (device, pipeline, render pass, framebuffer, etc.) and to simplify understanding of the real-time rendering examples we'll do later. The examples start from simple topics and gradually progress to more advanced topics.
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Creating a window
- Get information of the Vulkan devices (GPUs) on your system
- Creating a default surface from window system
- Creating logical devices and queues from physical devices
- Creating and managing a swapchain
- Creating command buffers from command pools and recording command buffers
- Creating synchronization objects (fence, semaphore) and basic synchronization
- Creating a render pass, simple pipeline and framebuffers
- Creating shader modules and loading external shader codes into these modules
- Creating and managing vertex and index buffers
- Drawing with only vertex information
- Drawing with vertices and indices (indexed drawing)
- Understanding primitive restart index
- Understanding and using staging buffers
- Drawing with a different topology (triangle strip)
- Using different polygon modes (lines, points etc.)
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Creating and managing descriptor pools
- Creating and managing descriptor sets and descriptor set layouts
- Updating descriptor sets
- Binding descriptor sets to the shaders
- Creating and updating uniform buffers
- Using multiple uniform buffers
- Basic 2D transformation (translation, rotation, scaling) with uniform buffers
- Using push constants in shaders and updating push constants
- Using array of uniform buffers
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Loading a texture from disk into an image buffer using staging buffer
- Creating and using samplers
- Creating descriptor sets for samplers and sampled images
- Applying textures into the meshes using shaders
- Understanding the usage of UV coordinates
- Creating descriptor sets for combined image samplers and using them in shaders
- Understanding of different wrap and filtering modes of samplers
- Using multiple samplers
- Using multiple textures and blending two textures in shaders
- Using transparent textures and understanding simple blending
- Using texture atlases for multiple texture and managing texture coordinates
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Understanding and using the MVP (Model-View-Projection) matrix to drawing in 3D
- Updating the MVP matrix in shaders via descriptor sets and push constants
- Enabling depth testing
- Creating a basic virtual camera with perspective projection
- Understanding and implementing a basic input system for keyboard and mouse
- Navigating a camera in 3D scene via keyboard and mouse input
- Understanding and implementing the delta time logic
- Understanding the face culling mechanism and using different kind of cull modes
- Using instanced drawing
- Managing the depth testing compare operations
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Understanding the load/store operations of the attachments in a render pass
- Enabling dynamic states in a pipeline and setting blending constant states dynamically
- Creating and using the multiple pipelines
- Understanding pipeline derivatives and creating a derived pipelines
- Understanding the basics of the stencil testing and enabling stencil testing
- Implementing a simple outlining with stencil testing operations
- Creating multiple subpass for a renderpass and using input attachments in shaders
- Rendering scene to a texture (offscreen rendering)
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Handling window resizing with recreating swap chains
- Using multiple viewports and scissors (via extension)
- Clear the one part of the screen dynamically
- Using dynamic pipeline states related to viewports and scissors
- Creating simple screen animation with setting scissor position dynamically
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Loading binary and ASCII formatted glTF models from disk to buffers
- Loading single and multiple meshes and rendering them as single colored wireframe
- Loading mesh textures and rendering textured meshes
- Applying node transformation in the glTF
The topics covered by this subsection:
- Enabling multisampling in Vulkan
- Getting maximum supported sample count of your window system
- Implementing basic MSAA
- Enabling sample shading
- Writing fragment shaders based on samples
- Explicit resolving of multisampled images
- Draw explicitly resolved scene to the screen
- Creating compute pipelines
- Generating dynamic fullscreen gradient image from compute shader
- Drawing results of the compute shader to the screen via storage images
- Creating a texture from compute shader
- Placing generated texture to the objects
- Writing more complex compute shaders
- Creating basic GPU-generated particles with compute shaders
- Generating and using storage buffers
- Using occlusion queries in Vulkan
- Checking visibility of an object via occlusion queries
- Using timestamp queries in Vulkan
- Measuring the GPU time of the commands
- Using pipeline statistics query in Vulkan
- Measuring input assembly vertices and primitives count of a pipeline
- Measuring shader invocation counts of a pipeline
- Using dynamic uniform buffers in Vulkan
- Using dynamic offsets to get information about drawn object from uniform buffer
- Using buffer suballocation technique in Vulkan
- Using one big buffer for different vertex and index data
- Using indirect drawing technique in Vulkan
- Learning basic GPU-driven drawing
- Using indexed indirect drawing
- Using specialization constants in Vulkan and shaders
- Creating pipelines with giving values to specialization constants
- Using pipeline caches in Vulkan
- Saving pipeline to a cache file
- Loading pipelines from a cache if the cache is available
- Implementing and using descriptor indexing feature in Vulkan
- Using variable sized sampler arrays in shaders
- Access variable sized sampler arrays via non-uniform indexing