Vulcan tutorial : For the interested what vulcan exactly does and is for the GPU.

May 11, 2008
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For anybody interested, this a tutorial about how to use the graphics API vulcan.
I was interested in how it works.
I have a general understanding of application programming interfaces (API) but i do not have detailed understanding. I am not planning to write my own games, but it could help when having fun with using the gpu as a compute source. Although i honestly admit i have at the moment no need for it. Only having the curiosity for it.

And it may help once or twice in finding a solution or providing explanation with a useful log in some issues for the game developers.

General site :
https://www.khronos.org/vulkan/

More detailed explanation how to use vulcan and what vulcan is:
https://vulkan-tutorial.com/Introduction

Origin of Vulkan
Just like the previous graphics APIs, Vulkan is designed as a cross-platform abstraction over GPUs. The problem with most of these APIs is that the era in which they were designed featured graphics hardware that was mostly limited to configurable fixed functionality. Programmers had to provide the vertex data in a standard format and were at the mercy of the GPU manufacturers with regards to lighting and shading options.

As graphics card architectures matured, they started offering more and more programmable functionality. All this new functionality had to be integrated with the existing APIs somehow. This resulted in less than ideal abstractions and a lot of guesswork on the graphics driver side to map the programmer's intent to the modern graphics architectures. That's why there are so many driver updates for improving the performance in games, sometimes by significant margins. Because of the complexity of these drivers, application developers also need to deal with inconsistencies between vendors, like the syntax that is accepted for shaders. Aside from these new features, the past decade also saw an influx of mobile devices with powerful graphics hardware. These mobile GPUs have different architectures based on their energy and space requirements. One such example is tiled rendering, which would benefit from improved performance by offering the programmer more control over this functionality. Another limitation originating from the age of these APIs is limited multi-threading support, which can result in a bottleneck on the CPU side.

Vulkan solves these problems by being designed from scratch for modern graphics architectures. It reduces driver overhead by allowing programmers to clearly specify their intent using a more verbose API, and allows multiple threads to create and submit commands in parallel. It reduces inconsistencies in shader compilation by switching to a standardized byte code format with a single compiler. Lastly, it acknowledges the general purpose processing capabilities of modern graphics cards by unifying the graphics and compute functionality into a single API.

This tutorial will teach you the basics of using the Vulkan graphics and compute API. Vulkan is a new API by the Khronos group (known for OpenGL) that provides a much better abstraction of modern graphics cards. This new interface allows you to better describe what your application intends to do, which can lead to better performance and less surprising driver behavior compared to existing APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D. The ideas behind Vulkan are similar to those of Direct3D 12 and Metal, but Vulkan has the advantage of being fully cross-platform and allows you to develop for Windows, Linux and Android at the same time.

However, the price you pay for these benefits is that you have to work with a significantly more verbose API. Every detail related to the graphics API needs to be set up from scratch by your application, including initial frame buffer creation and memory management for objects like buffers and texture images. The graphics driver will do a lot less hand holding, which means that you will have to do more work in your application to ensure correct behavior.

The takeaway message here is that Vulkan is not for everyone. It is targeted at programmers who are enthusiastic about high performance computer graphics, and are willing to put some work in. If you are more interested in game development, rather than computer graphics, then you may wish to stick to OpenGL or Direct3D, which will not be deprecated in favor of Vulkan anytime soon. Another alternative is to use an engine like Unreal Engine or Unity, which will be able to use Vulkan while exposing a much higher level API to you.

With that out of the way, let's cover some prerequisites for following this tutorial:

  • A graphics card and driver compatible with Vulkan (NVIDIA, AMD, Intel)
  • Experience with C++ (familiarity with RAII, initializer lists)
  • A compiler compatible with C++11 (Visual Studio 2013+, GCC 4.8+)
  • Some existing experience with 3D computer graphics
This tutorial will not assume knowledge of OpenGL or Direct3D concepts, but it does require you to know the basics of 3D computer graphics. It will not explain the math behind perspective projection, for example. See this online book for a great introduction of computer graphics concepts.

You can use C instead of C++ if you want, but you will have to use a different linear algebra library and you will be on your own in terms of code structuring. We will use C++ features like classes and RAII to organize logic and resource lifetimes.
 
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May 11, 2008
19,302
1,129
126
It gives good insight in what a game has to do to get a 3d image on the screen.
Examples are given how to querie the hardware capabilities that the graphics card has to offer and explains that these capabilities must be mapped to what is needed by the program like a 3d engine.
That is really interesting.