Summary
In this chapter, we improved our GPU device implementation to make it easier to manage a large number of textures with bindless resources. We explained which extensions are needed and detailed which changes are required when creating a descriptor set layout to allow the use of bindless resources. We then showed the changes needed when creating a descriptor set to update the array of textures in use.
We then added automatic pipeline layout generation by parsing the SPIR-V binaries generated by the glslang
compiler for our shaders. We provided an overview of the SPIR-V binary data format and explained how to parse it to extract the resources bound to a shader, and how to use this information to create a pipeline layout.
Finally, we enhanced our pipeline creation API by adding pipeline caching to improve the load times of our applications after the first run. We presented the Vulkan APIs that are needed to either generate or load the pipeline cache data. We also explained...