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Shabi's Vulkan Tutorials (!OUTDATED!)

NOTE: Do NOT follow this tutorial, Vulkan has improved a lot, and the API presented in these tutorials is outdated. For example, use dynamic rendering (introduced in VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering, promoted to Vulkan 1.3) instead of VkRenderPass objects. Another examples include use of dynamic state, VK_EXT_graphics_pipeline_library (or VK_EXT_shader_object), VK_KHR_synchronization2, timeline semaphores, descriptor buffers, descriptor indexing and more.

Travis-CI: Build Status

This is a repository of tutorials on Vulkan. It starts with the basics, enumerating your GPUs, allocating memory and getting computation done. It then moves on to actually displaying things and using shaders. Along the way, some of the optional Vulkan layers are explored.

Each tutorial may use functions implemented in a previous tutorial. The functions are thus named as tutX_*() so that it would be immediately obvious which tutorial you should refer to, if you don't remember what that function does.

These tutorials were developed in Linux, and I have no intention of trying them on Windows. Feel free to send a pull request for the tweaks they would need to run on that. You would need the following external libraries:

  • Vulkan, of course
  • SDL2
  • X11-xcb
  • ncurses (optional for Tutorial 12)

The tutorials are source code themselves, with enough comments in them to explain how things are done and/or why. I strongly recommend reading the Vulkan specifications alongside the tutorials. It is well-written and easy to grasp. Also note that Vulkan is not for the faint of heart. I expect you are not struggling with reading C code and have some understanding of computer graphics and operating systems.

The main.c of each tutorial glues together the functionalities implemented in the tut*.c files, and may include uninteresting things like printing out information. The core usage of Vulkan is usually in tut[0-9]\+.c files, with tut[0-9]\+_render.c files containing utilities useful for rendering based on top of the core functions.

Build and Execution

This project uses autotools. If you have received the project as a release tarball, you can go through the usual procedure:

mkdir build && cd build
../configure --enable-silent-rules
make -j

If your Vulkan SDK installation is not in the standard locations, you would need to have the VULKAN_SDK variable set, for example set it in your environment:

export VULKAN_SDK=/path/to/vulkan/arch

Or run configure file with this environment:

VULKAN_SDK=/path/to/vulkan/arch ../configure

If you are building from source, you would need autotools installed as well as autoconf-archive and do the following step beforehand:

autoreconf -i

Each tutorial will have an executable in its own directory that you can run.

Disclaimer: I am writing these tutorials as I am learning Vulkan myself. I am in no way an expert in computer graphics and my own knowledge of OpenGL barely passes 1.2. Please do not consider these tutorials as "best practices" in Vulkan. They are intended to merely ease you in Vulkan, getting you familiar with the API. How to best utilize the API is beyond me at this point.