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Learning Vulkan
Learning Vulkan

Learning Vulkan: Get introduced to the next generation graphics API—Vulkan

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Learning Vulkan

Chapter 2. Your First Vulkan Pseudo Program

In the last chapter, we provided a very basic introduction to visualize the new Vulkan API. We hovered through the high-level ecosystem design of this API and also understood the internal module's functionality to learn its execution model.

In this chapter, we will learn about the installation process to get ready to work with Vulkan pseudocode programming. The explicit nature of Vulkan makes the programming verbose. In Vulkan, a simple Hello World!!! program may end up with around 1,500 lines of code. This means trying even a simple example will be a challenge for beginners. But let's not hit the panic button; we will go through the entire Hello World!!! program with a simple pseudocode programming model.

Beginners will also learn about a step-by-step approach to building their first Vulkan application in a user-friendly way. In the following chapters of this book, we will delve into the real coding process and get our hands...

Installing Vulkan

Enough discussing about Vulkan. Now we will delve into the installation process and learn all we need to make Vulkan work.

Tip

Before you go ahead with the installation, please go through the software-hardware requirements, which you will find in the code files provided with this book. If your system complies with the requirements mentioned, you are good to go with the installation process.

Please follow these instructions to install Vulkan:

  1. The Vulkan driver: Most vendors now have their Vulkan support included in the normal driver package. First, install the Vulkan driver. You can choose the installation location; otherwise, the default location will do. For instance, if you are installing NVIDIA drivers, the installer first checks the system configuration to scan any compatibility issues with the installing driver. It will upgrade any preinstalled driver on the system.
  2. Install Python: Install Python and make sure you add it to the path. This can be done by simply placing...

The Hello World!!! pseudocode

In this section, we will build our first Hello World!!! Vulkan application. The application is built using the pseudocode program model, which offers the following benefits:

  • Learning through a step-by-step process how to build a Vulkan application.
  • Vulkan coding is lengthy and beginners might get lost in the detail. The pseudocode highlights only the necessary details that are easy to understand.
  • A compact form of the program, which is easier for first-time users to memorize.
  • Each pseudocode uses the real Vulkan API and explains the control flow.
  • By the end of this chapter, if you are a complete beginner, you'll able to understand Vulkan programming and all the necessary clues to build applications from scratch. In addition, you will learn about the high-level concepts of Vulkan APIs with their responsibilities and functionalities.
  • For a detailed understanding of the API, use the Vulkan specification available with the LunarG SDK. Or refer to https://www.khronos...

Fitting it all together

This section provides a short description of the working of our first Vulkan pseudo application. The following diagram is a snapshot of the working model:

Fitting it all together

First, the application creates the Vulkan instance and device at the initialization stage with the necessary layers enabled and extensions created. The device exposes various queues (graphics or compute) as shown in the preceding diagram. These queues gather the command buffers and submit them to the physical device for processing.

Using the WSI extension, drawing surfaces are prepared for rendering graphic contents. The swapchain exposes these drawing surface as images, which are used in the form of image views. Similarly, the depth image view is prepared. These image view objects are used by the framebuffer. Render Pass makes use of this framebuffer to define a unit-rendering operation.

The command buffer is allocated from command buffer pools, and it is used to record various commands along with the Render Pass...

Summary

In this chapter, we explored the step-by-step process of installing Vulkan on your system. Then we pseudo programmed "Hello World!!!" where we rendered a tricolor triangle on the display window.

This introductory chapter has boiled down Vulkan to a level where understanding this graphics API is really easy for beginners. This chapter is a cheat code for Vulkan programming; it can be used as a reference to remember all the programming steps along with all their respective APIs in the correct order.

Aristotle said, "Well begun is half done!" With the completion of the first two chapters, we have built a strong foundation to fully understand Vulkan mechanics from scratch; we will do this in the upcoming chapters.

In the next chapter, we will delve into core programming and start building our first Vulkan application. You will learn about layers and extensions and how to enable them implicitly and explicitly. We will also look into the fundamentals of Vulkan instances...

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Key benefits

  • Get started with the Vulkan API and its programming techniques using the easy-to-follow examples to create stunning 3D graphics
  • Understand memory management in Vulkan and implement image and buffer resources
  • Get hands-on with the drawing process and synchronization, and render a 3D graphics scene with the Vulkan graphics pipeline

Description

Vulkan, the next generation graphics and compute API, is the latest offering by Khronos. This API is the successor of OpenGL and unlike OpenGL, it offers great flexibility and high performance capabilities to control modern GPU devices. With this book, you'll get great insights into the workings of Vulkan and how you can make stunning graphics run with minimum hardware requirements. We begin with a brief introduction to the Vulkan system and show you its distinct features with the successor to the OpenGL API. First, you will see how to establish a connection with hardware devices to query the available queues, memory types, and capabilities offered. Vulkan is verbose, so before diving deep into programing, you’ll get to grips with debugging techniques so even first-timers can overcome error traps using Vulkan’s layer and extension features. You’ll get a grip on command buffers and acquire the knowledge to record various operation commands into command buffer and submit it to a proper queue for GPU processing. We’ll take a detailed look at memory management and demonstrate the use of buffer and image resources to create drawing textures and image views for the presentation engine and vertex buffers to store geometry information. You'll get a brief overview of SPIR-V, the new way to manage shaders, and you'll define the drawing operations as a single unit of work in the Render pass with the help of attachments and subpasses. You'll also create frame buffers and build a solid graphics pipeline, as well as making use of the synchronizing mechanism to manage GPU and CPU hand-shaking. By the end, you’ll know everything you need to know to get your hands dirty with the coolest Graphics API on the block.

Who is this book for?

This book is ideal for graphic programmers who want to get up and running with Vulkan. It’s also great for programmers who have experience with OpenGL and other graphic APIs who want to take advantage of next generation APIs. A good knowledge of C/C++ is expected.

What you will learn

  • Learn fundamentals of Vulkan programing model to harness the power of modern GPU devices.
  • Implement device, command buffer and queues to get connected with the physical hardware.
  • Explore various validation layers and learn how to use it for debugging Vulkan application.
  • Get a grip on memory management to control host and device memory operations.
  • Understand and implement buffer and image resource types in Vulkan.
  • Define drawing operations in the Render pass and implement graphics pipeline.
  • Manage GLSL shader using SPIR-V and update the shader resources with descriptor sets and push constants.
  • Learn the drawing process, manage resources with synchronization objects and render 3D scene output on screen with Swapchain.
  • Bring realism to your rendered 3D scene with textures, and implement linear and optimal textures
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Publication date : Dec 15, 2016
Length: 466 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

11 Chapters
1. Getting Started with the NextGen 3D Graphics API Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Your First Vulkan Pseudo Program Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Shaking Hands with the Device Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Debugging in Vulkan Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Command Buffer and Memory Management in Vulkan Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Allocating Image Resources and Building a Swapchain with WSI Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Buffer Resource, Render Pass, Framebuffer, and Shaders with SPIR-V Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Pipelines and Pipeline State Management Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Drawing Objects Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Descriptors and Push Constant Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Drawing Textures Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

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Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2.8
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5 star 36.4%
4 star 0%
3 star 9.1%
2 star 18.2%
1 star 36.4%
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Amazon Customer Feb 20, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
A very good, informative and easy to approach book for a beginner. Just finished reading it and learnt a lot.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Hurricane san Jan 02, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
This the best book on Vulkan so far, in my opinion of course. I felt my understanding on Vulkan improving a lot reading this. (Before this I had the Vulkan Programming Guide that for some reason felt like barely an improvement over the public API documents).It may help you too.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Cliente Amazon Jun 02, 2020
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Perfect book to start to learn Vulkan.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
cybereality Mar 02, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Learning Vulkan by Parminder Singh is an excellent foray into the Vulkan graphics API and quite a competent book. The text is a reasonable 466 pages, and packs a lot in there. Singh covers all the basics of using Vulkan and goes into great detail at each step of the way. Not only is there actual C++ code shown (a lot of it), but he explains each API call and what objects to pass it, a breakdown of each object structure and what it does, what’s valid (or invalid) for data you can put in, and so forth. I have not read the official Vulkan Programming Guide yet (that’s coming next) so I’m not able to compare them here. However, this book is an absolute treasure trove of information, and presented with clear context, not just a copy and paste of API docs.While the book is not particularly long, the author does manage to cover a good amount of ground. Of the topics included are: getting started with the LunarG SDK, initializing the API, debugging, command buffers and memory management, allocating image resources and the swapchain, buffers, render passes, framebuffers, working with SPIR-V shaders, pipelines and pipeline state management, descriptors and push constants, and finally drawing a textured polygon. I’m still getting acquainted with Vulkan myself, but this does seem to touch on all the fundamental topics to get started with the API. It really seems like Parminder Singh knows what he is talking about and feel I learned a lot finishing this text.One thing to keep in mind, this is not really a book about graphics programming techniques, but rather a survey of the API. Meaning, unlike Frank Luna’s DirectX books, you won’t have any cool demos to showcase at the end. Through the whole book you’re basically just working with the initialization of the Vulkan API, though you do end up with a colored triangle and finally a textured cube. This is honestly fine, and just what is needed at this point in the life of Vulkan. Flashy demos are cool, sure, but once you have the fundamentals down, it shouldn’t be hard to apply that knowledge, or port techniques from other APIs.I will note, however, that I wish there was more discussion into the performance cost or characteristics of parts of the Vulkan API. For example, sometimes there are multiple ways to perform an action (like with uniform buffers or push constants getting data into a shader) and there wasn’t much explanation as to when to do one thing over the other. This is not a huge concern, as there are lots of articles online covering these types of things and it seems the book is there to get you familiar with the concepts and data structures to allow you to do your own research later. Certainly, I still have a lot of questions but I can’t imagine a more thorough book as an introduction to this relatively new API.Some familiarity with older graphics APIs will probably help, but I don’t think it’s absolutely needed. In my opinion, if you are wanting to learn graphics programming today, you might as well just jump into Vulkan (or DirectX12, if you prefer) as the industry will quickly adopt these new, lower-level APIs and you will be setting yourself up for the future. Do understand, though, that Vulkan is extremely verbose and needs something like 1,000 lines of code just to get a triangle on the screen. So stark beginners may be put off by that complexity. And you should definitely have good working knowledge of C++ before getting into this. With that in mind, however, I think that Learning Vulkan by Parminder Singh is a great place to start to delve into this exciting new world of Vulkan. Well worth reading.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Alejandro Dec 06, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
This book is good for beginners. Everything is properly explained (sometimes using a too much tiring pattern for simple details such as struct fields that after a couple of examples, the reader gets used to the "how it works").The framework provided works perfectly, and lets the user read and study all functionalities.In my opinion, global approach is the main lack of this book: it would help a lot to include good explanations and examples about how the main functionalities in Vulkan piece up together. Also, the last part (specially the shader related chapter) has explanations that could be improved.I'd recommend this book to people trying to learn Vulkan, specially those with at least some knowledge about graphics programming.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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