Improving Resources Management
In this chapter, we are going to improve resource management to make it easier to deal with materials that might have a varying number of textures. This technique is usually referred to as bindless, even though it’s not entirely accurate. We are still going to bind a list of resources; however, we can access them by using an index rather than having to specify exactly which resources are going to be used during a particular draw.
The second improvement we are going to make is automating the generation of pipeline layouts. Large projects have hundreds or thousands of shaders, compiled with many different variations depending on the combinations of materials used by a particular application. If developers had to manually update their pipeline layout definitions every time a change is made, very few applications would make it to market. The implementation presented in this chapter relies on the information provided by the SPIR-V binary format.
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