Chapter -1: about this series
This series is a work in progress
What it is
An overview of GPU programming with Vulkan for computational and graphical purposes.
Each chapter contains two parts:
- A concise, high-level overview of the topic at hand, meant to provide a mental model of the API
- A more detailed coverage of the same topic, this time focusing on how these concepts are implemented in the API
What it is not
- A step-by-step guide to implementing a rendering engine
- A collection of concrete examples
- A guide to the math behind computer graphics
In fact, this series is almost free of code samples, as I feel that those would have bloated the articles without bringing much of value: Vulkan is very verbosen and writing the code is not the hard part. Its main goal is to provide enough conceptual understanding to make the implementation easy. Samples can be found online.
Prerequisites
Knowing how to read and program.
Why not read X instead?
I have been working on Batyr on-and-off for the past few years (2% of the time on and the remaining 98% off), and I have had the time to forget everything about Vulkan a few times by now. Getting back in the saddle is unpleasant: most guides are too verbose or focused on specific workloads for my liking (I cannot see how the pieces fit together if everything is spread over 40 different pages), and the doc is a bit too terse (as a good doc should be). This guide aims for a sweet spot. It focuses on big ideas and leaves implementation details aside — the doc is here to fill the gaps.
A particularity of this guide is that it introduces Vulkan as a general library for interacting with GPUs, rather than focusing solely on graphics programming. This offers two key benefits: other Vulkan functionalities do not feel like afterthoughts, and it makes it possible to introduce the API's complexity in a staggered manner. By the time we get to the graphics pipeline, most involved concepts should feel familiar.
I believe that this guide can serve as a decent introduction to Vulkan for resourceful beginners, but what do I know? Maybe it is too close to personal notes for that purpose.
Some good alternatives/complementary sources
- https://www.vulkan.org/learn
- https://docs.vulkan.org/guide/latest/index.html
- https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/1.3-extensions/html/
- https://vkguide.dev
- https://renderdoc.org/vulkan-in-30-minutes.html
- https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Samples
- https://vulkan-tutorial.com/
Caveat
May Will contain mistakes, I am not a pro.