Khronos Vulkan^® Tutorial

The Khronos Vulkan^® Tutorial is based on the "Vulkan Tutorial" by Alexander Overvoorde licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Compared to the original tutorial, this version of the tutorial is teaching up-to-date concepts:

It also contains Vulkan usage clarifications, improved synchronization and new content.

This tutorial will teach you the basics of using the Vulkan graphics and compute API. Vulkan is an API by the Khronos group that provides a much better abstraction of modern graphics cards. This new interface allows you to better describe what your application intends to do, which can lead to better performance and less surprising driver behavior compared to existing APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D. The ideas behind Vulkan are similar to those of Direct3D 12 and Metal, but Vulkan has the advantage of being fully cross-platform and allows you to develop for Windows, Linux and Android at the same time.

However, the price you pay for these benefits is that you have to work with a significantly more verbose and nuanced API. Every detail related to the graphics API needs to be set up by your application, including initial frame buffer creation and memory management for objects like buffers and texture images. The graphics driver will do a lot less hand holding, which means that you will have to do more work in your application to ensure correct behavior.

Where possible, we do take advantage of modern tools to make this easier in this tutorial to work with and learn Vulkan; however, Vulkan isn’t meant to be easy.

The takeaway message here is that Vulkan is not for everyone. It is targeted at programmers who are enthusiastic about high performance computer graphics and are willing to put some work in. If you are more interested in game development, rather than computer graphics, then you may wish to stick to OpenGL or Direct3D, which will not be deprecated in favor of Vulkan anytime soon. However, understanding the sacrifice of staying in OpenGL is that API will never get the latest features like Ray Tracing or AI. OpenGL is in maintenance, Vulkan is where research and new features are available. Another alternative is to use an engine like Unreal Engine or Unity, which will be able to use Vulkan while exposing a much higher level API to you.

With that out of the way, let’s cover some prerequisites for the following this tutorial:

This tutorial will not assume knowledge of OpenGL or Direct3D concepts, but it does require you to know the basics of 3D computer graphics. It will not explain the math behind perspective projection, for example. See this online book for a great introduction of computer graphics concepts. Some other great computer graphics resources are:

You can use C instead of C++ if you want, but you will have to use a different linear algebra library, and you will be on your own in terms of code structuring. We will use C++ features like classes and RAII to organize logic and resource lifetimes.

To make it easier to learn to work with Vulkan, we’ll be using the newer Vulkan-Hpp bindings that abstract some of the dirty work and help prevent certain classes of errors. We’ll also use Vulkan raii and the Vulkan C++20 module. With this combination, we show how to use Vulkan in a method that will translate directly into large projects where C++ libraries have traditionally caused large build times while also showing one method of making Vulkan a joy to work with.

To make it easier to understand the core concepts and to follow along for developers using other programming languages, also to get some experience with the base API we’ll be using the original C API when we describe the objects and the concepts that are being used.

The contents of this repository are licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0, unless stated otherwise. By contributing to this repository, you agree to license your contributions to the public under that same license.

We’ll start with an overview of how Vulkan works and the work we’ll have to do to get the first triangle on the screen. The purpose of all the smaller steps will make more sense after you’ve understood their basic role in the whole picture. Next, we’ll set up the development environment with the Vulkan SDK, the GLM library for linear algebra operations and GLFW for window creation. The tutorial will cover how to set these up on Windows with Visual Studio, and on Ubuntu Linux with GCC.

After that, we’ll implement all the basic components of a Vulkan program that are necessary to render your first triangle. Each chapter will follow roughly the following structure:

Although each chapter is written as a follow-up on the previous one, it is also possible to read the chapters as standalone articles introducing a certain Vulkan feature. That means that the site is also useful as a reference. All the Vulkan functions and types are linked to the specification, so you can click them to learn more. You are encouraged to submit feedback to this Khronos repository.

As mentioned before, the Vulkan API has a rather verbose API with many parameters to give you maximum control over the graphics hardware. This causes basic operations like creating a texture to take a lot of steps that have to be repeated every time. Therefore, we’ll be creating our own collection of helper functions throughout the tutorial.

Every chapter will also conclude with a link to the full code listing up to that point. You can refer to it if you have any doubts about the structure of the code, or if you’re dealing with a bug and want to compare. All the code files have been tested on graphics cards from multiple vendors to verify correctness. Each chapter also has a comment section at the end where you can ask any questions that are relevant to the specific subject. Please specify your platform, driver version, source code, expected behavior and actual behavior to help us help you.

If you have any type of feedback on the tutorial and site itself, then please don’t hesitate to submit an issue or pull request to the GitHub repository. You can watch the repository to be notified of updates to the tutorial.

After you’ve gone through the ritual of drawing your very first Vulkan powered triangle onscreen, we’ll start expanding the program to include linear transformations, textures and 3D models.

If you’ve played with graphics APIs before, then you’ll know that there can be a lot of steps until the first geometry shows up on the screen. There are many of these initial steps in Vulkan, but you’ll see that each of the individual steps is easy to understand and does not feel redundant. It’s also important to keep in mind that once you have that boring looking triangle, drawing fully textured 3D models does not take that much extra work, and each step beyond that point is much more rewarding.

If you encounter any problems while following the tutorial, then first check the FAQ to see if your problem and its solution is already listed there. If you are still stuck after that, then feel free to ask for help in the comment section of the closest related chapter.

Ready to dive into the future of high performance graphics APIs? Let’s go!