Vulkan Programming Guide: The Official Guide to Learning Vulkan

by John M. Kessenich, Graham Sellers

<!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--> The Definitive Vulkan™ Developer’s Guide and Master the Next-Generation Specification for Cross-Platform Graphics The next generation of the OpenGL specification, Vulkan, has been redesigned from the ground up, giving applications direct control over GPU acceleration for unprecedented performance and predictability. Vulkan™ Programming Guide is the essential, authoritative reference to this new standard for experienced graphics programmers in all Vulkan environments. Vulkan API lead Graham Sellers (with contributions from language lead John Kessenich) presents example-rich introductions to the portable Vulkan API and the new SPIR-V shading language. The author introduces Vulkan, its goals, and the key concepts framing its API, and presents a complex rendering system that demonstrates both Vulkan’s uniqueness and its exceptional power. You’ll find authoritative coverage of topics ranging from drawing to memory, and threading to compute shaders. The author especially shows how to handle tasks such as synchronization, scheduling, and memory management that are now the developer’s responsibility. Vulkan™ Programming Guide introduces powerful 3D development techniques for fields ranging from video games to medical imaging, and state-of-the-art approaches to solving challenging scientific compute problems. Whether you’re upgrading from OpenGL or moving to open-standard graphics APIs for the first time, this guide will help you get the results and performance you’re looking for. Coverage includes <!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--> <!--[if gte mso 10]> <![endif]-->

Genres: Reference

480 pages, Paperback

Published October 31, 2016

Reviews

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's exactly what you'd think it is. It's not a riveting read, but it's a pretty thorough run-over of the subject. Perhaps best if you're already quite familiar with modern rendering APIs, though.

[N0dgrand87 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is much convenient than just to read Vulkan spec to get the idea about major Vulkan API concepts.
The issue is it lacks examples or description for proper uses cases for data structures\APIs described
However, It gives a good overview of multipass rendering and deferred rendering use cases and how it could be done with Vulkan APIs in great details.

[Gregory Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vulkan Programming Guide is an excellent resource for experienced practitioners that interact with the Vulkan Graphics and Compute API, including device initialization, compute and graphics shaders, rendering, synchronization, and a ton more. If you use graphics cards pipelines, this book should be on your shelf.

Vulkan Programming Guide is not several things, however:
- Deeply informative about GLSL, which Vulkan pipelines consume.
- A Beginner's Guide to Graphics or Graphics Compute.
- Easy to read from cover to cover.

VPG does not claim to be any of those things, but some readers might have the wrong impression.

I definitely noticed the frequent typos which I hope will be corrected in future printings, but they did not impede understanding the text. I still wish someone had run the final draft through spellcheck. I can't believe we're still dealing with transposed-character misspellings in 2016.

[Samiur]

Just read the official docs provided by the Khronos Group and platform specific providers like LunarG: https://vulkan.lunarg.com/doc/sdk/1.2...

[Tim Verstraete · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this book, I found it better written then the OpenGL books I have read ... only 2 major remarks = more and better drawings, diagrams, architecture overview and secondly get the source code out, I would rather have incomplete and imperfect code and see the complete context than see nothing now ... thankfully the vulkan SDK contains a lot of good examples!

[Rodrigo Hernandez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sparse, the book kind of reads like the Vulkan specification with sidenotes and seems to jump from one topic to a different one unrelated at the time. You have to go back and forth looking for what you need to do next rather having a natural progression of topics.