Vulkan Documentation

The Vulkan specification describes the Vulkan Application Programming Interface (API). Vulkan is a C99 API designed for explicit control of low-level graphics and compute functionality.

The specification is aimed at implementors of Vulkan and at developers that already know the basics of Vulkan and want to read up on more advanced topics.

The Vulkan feature descriptions include extension documents that are written outlining the proposed API for new extensions. They are the base for the final extension specification and contain supplementary documentation.

It is closely related to the Vulkan specification and can help to understand why an extension or a feature has been implemented in a given way.

The Vulkan Guide is designed to help developers get up and going with the world of Vulkan. It is aimed to be a light read that leads to many other useful links depending on what a developer is looking for. All information is intended to help better fill the gaps about the many nuances of the Vulkan ecosystem including peripheral topics like shading languages.

The Guide is a good starting point for first time Vulkan developers.

The Vulkan Samples are a collection of resources to help you develop optimized Vulkan applications. These C++ samples demonstrate a wide range of Vulkan’s functionality. From writing a first "Hello triangle" sample to rendering complex scenes, doing GPU based work and using hardware accelerated ray tracing, these samples are trying to help developers learn how to use Vulkan.

The Vulkan tutorial will teach you the basics of using Vulkan. It’ll help you get started with the API and teaches you how to get your first graphics and compute programs up and running using the C++ programming language.

The Tutorial is aimed at people starting with Vulkan. If you are new to Vulkan, this should be your starting point.

Although Vulkan consumes shaders in SPIR-V, one of the most widely used shading languages is GLSL. This part of the documentation site contains the GLSL shading language specification with Vulkan specific extensions.

Vulkan is a available on a wide range of platforms. To develop with it, you first need an implementation that supports Vulkan. Most systems nowadays support Vulkan out of the box, as support ships via graphics cards drivers.

For actually writing code that uses Vulkan, you need bindings for your programming language like the C bindings (that also work with C++) or the C++ bindings that offers a C++ based interface to the API.

While not a requirement for developing Vulkan application, the LunarG Vulkan SDK is a convenient package of components and tools to help with developing Vulkan applications. Using the SDK is recommended.

The Vulkan SDK contains C and C++ project templates for Microsoft Visual Studio that can be used as a starting point for writing Vulkan programs.

Another option is to follow the development environment chapter of the The Vulkan tutorial which has instructions for different platforms.

As a third option, the The Vulkan Samples come with build system that supports different platforms and C++ based development environments.