Computer graphics have a very long and interesting history. Many APIs or custom approaches to the generation of 2D or 3D images have come and gone. A landmark in this history was the invention of OpenGL, one of the first graphics libraries, which allowed us to create real‑time, high-performance 3D graphics, and which was available for everyone on multiple operating systems. It is still developed and widely used even today. And this year we can celebrate its 25th birthday!
But many things have changed since OpenGL was created. The graphics hardware industry is evolving very quickly. And recently, to accommodate these changes, a new approach to 3D graphics rendering was presented. It took the form of a low‑level access to the graphics hardware. OpenGL was designed as a high-level API, which allows users to easily render images on screen. But this high‑level approach, convenient for users, is difficult for graphics drivers to handle. This is one of the main reasons for restricting the hardware to show its full potential. The new approach tries to overcome these struggles–it gives users much more control over the hardware, but also many more responsibilities. This way application developers can release the full potential of the graphics hardware, because the drivers no longer block them. Low‑level access allows drivers to be much smaller, much thinner. But these benefits come at the expense of much more work that needs to done by the developers.
The first evangelist of the new approach to graphics rendering was a Mantle API designed by AMD. When it proved that low‑level access can give considerable performance benefits, other companies started working on their own graphics libraries. One of the most notable representatives of the new trend were Metal API, designed by Apple, and DirectX 12, developed by Microsoft.
But all of the above libraries were developed with specific operating systems and/or hardware in mind. There was no open and multiplatform standard such as OpenGL. Until last year. Year 2016 saw the release of the Vulkan API, developed by Khronos consortium, which maintains the OpenGL library. Vulkan also represents the new approach, a low‑level access to the graphics hardware, but unlike the other libraries it is available for everyone on multiple operating systems and hardware platforms–from high‑performance desktop computers with Windows or Linux operating systems, to mobile devices with Android OS. And as it is still being very new, there are few resources teaching developers how to use it. This book tries to fill this gap.
