Creating a graphics pipeline

A graphics pipeline consists of programmable, fixed-function pipeline stages, Render Passes, subpasses, and pipeline layouts. The programmable stages include multiple shader stages, such as the vertex, fragment, tessellation, geometry, and compute shaders. The fixed-function states consist of multiple pipeline state objects (PSOs) that represent the dynamic, vertex input, input assembly, rasterization, blending, viewport, multisampling, and depth-stencil states.

A graphics pipeline object (VkPipeline) is created using the vkCreateGraphicsPipelines() API. This API intakes the programmable stages, fixed-function pipeline stages, and pipeline layouts through a metadata control structure called VkGraphicsPipelineCreateInfo. The following is the syntax of the vkCreateGraphicsPipelines() API:

VkResult vkCreateGraphicsPipelines( 
    VkDevice                                    device, 
    VkPipelineCache                             pipelineCache, 
   ...