Generating textures in Vulkan using compute shaders

Now that we can initialize and use compute shaders, it is time to give a few examples of how to use these. Let's start with some basic procedural texture generation. In this recipe, we implement a small program to display animated textures whose pixel values are calculated in real time inside our custom compute shader. To add even more value to this recipe, we will port a GLSL shader from https://www.shadertoy.com to our Vulkan compute shader.

Getting ready

The compute pipeline creation code and Vulkan application initialization are the same as in the Initializing compute shaders in Vulkan recipe. Make sure you read this before proceeding further. To use and display the generated texture, we need a textured quad renderer. Its complete source code can be found in shared/vkRenderers/VulkanSingleQuad.cpp. We will not focus on its internals here because, at this point, it should be easy for you to implement such a renderer...