HelloVulkan

Learning Vulkan.

Resources

• Vulkan Tutorial
• Vulkan Guide
• Vulkan 1.2 Specs
• VulkanGuide
• Model View Projection
• Vulkan Memory Allocator
• glTF
• Physically Based Rendering in Filament
• RenderDoc

Development

git clone git@github.com:mnerv/HelloVulkan.git

Requirements

• CMake 3.21+
• Vulkan SDK

Dependencies are fetched automatically via CMake's FetchContent.

Build

Setup CMake with Ninja:

cmake -S . -Bbuild -GNinja -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug

Build with Ninja:

ninja -C build

Compile Shaders

Use glslc to compile the shaders

glslc shader.vert -o shader.vert.spv
glslc shader.frag -o shader.frag.spv

Windows

Download and install the SDK and it'll add 2 Environment Variables in your System variables, VK_SDK_PATH and VULKAN_SDK. These 2 variables are used for finding the vulkan-1.lib library.

macOS

Install SDK for macOS, the installer will add VULKAN_SDK, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH, VK_SDK_PATH and VK_ICD_FILENAMES to your environments, if not you'll need to add it manually.

Example: Environment variables

export VULKAN_SDK={PATH_TO_VULKAN_SDK}/macOS
export PATH=$VULKAN_SDK/bin:$PATH
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=$VULKAN_SDK/lib:${DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH}
export VK_LAYER_PATH=$VULKAN_SDK/share/vulkan/explicit_layer.d
export VK_ICD_FILENAMES=$VULKAN_SDK/share/vulkan/icd.d/MoltenVK_icd.json

NOTE: This setup is only for development, you can't ship it yet.

Notes

Check vk_layer_settings.txt in Vulkan SDK Config.

Operations in Vulkan requires command, such as uploading textures to be submitted to a queue. There are different type of queues for subset of commands.

Surface: is a list of image buffers that are eventually displayed to the user.

https://www.khronos.org/registry/vulkan/specs/1.2-extensions/html/vkspec.html#boilerplate-wsi-header

Vulkan Graphics Pipeline

Typical graphics pipeline:

graphics_pipeline = [
  input_assembler,
  vertex_shader,
  tessellation_control_shader,
  tessellator,
  tessellation_evaluation_shader,
  geometry_shader,
  transform_feedback,
  rasterizer,
  fragment_shader,
  color_blend,
]

Some techniques also make use of compute shaders, which run outside the graphics pipeline:

[
  compute_shader,  // DLSS, ray tracing (VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline), particle simulation,
                   // physics, culling, post-processing (bloom, SSAO)
]

Compute shaders don't insert into the pipeline - they run as separate dispatch calls. The typical order is:

frame = [
  compute_shader,    // before: culling, physics, build ray tracing acceleration structures
  ...graphics_pipeline,
  compute_shader,    // after: DLSS, bloom, SSAO, tone mapping
  present,
]