New Vulkan example: Cascaded shadow mapping

In what is most probably my last Vulkan example for 2017 I have added a cascaded shadow mapping example to my open source Vulkan C++ example repository: One big problem of traditional shadow mapping, esp. with large outdoor scenes is the resolution you get as one single shadow map has to cover the whole camera spectrum. With cascaded shadow maps the frustum is split up into multiple frustums (along scene depth) with each getting it’s own, full-resolution, depth map. [Read More]

Combined Vulkan and OpenGL ES listing for android

Upon popular request I finally got around combining android device data from my Vulkan and OpenGL ES hardware databases into a convenient table. This should be handy if you plan on supporting both apis on Vulkan or if you just need to check for general device support. The new page can be reached via https://android.gpuinfo.org/ It combines all android device reports from the Vulkan database with all reports from the OpenGL ES database and also uses google’s official device list for translating device IDs (stored with Vulkan and OpenGL ES reports) into actual retail names. [Read More]

Headless Vulkan examples

I have just added two minimal, mostly self-contained cross-platform headless Vulkan examples to my open source C++ Vulkan repository. Unlike the other examples in my repository these two don’t require a surface (created from a window) and as such can be run on systems with no window compositor. The intention behind the two examples is to show how Vulkan can be used for running graphics and compute tasks without the need for an actual user interface to be present i. [Read More]

The Vulkan Device Simulation Layer

LunarG recently made the new Vulkan Device Simulation layer public. This is a Vulkan instance level layer that injects physical device properties, limits and features based on a json input file, simulating different features than the actual Vulkan device you are running on. The idea behind this is to help developers check if their Vulkan applications can handle devices with missing features and tighter limits without having to actually run on a such a device. [Read More]

iOS and macOS support added to the Vulkan examples

Thanks to a contribution from Bill Hollings, one of the developers from MoltenVK , my open source C++ Vulkan examples now also support Apple’s iOS and macOS platforms. MoltenVK is a commercial Vulkan implementation that runs on top of Apple’s Metal api with a free trial available. Details on how to build and run the examples for those platforms can be found in this readme. Note that not all examples will work on iOS or macOS due to the differences in supported features like geometry or tessellation shaders not being available in Metal. [Read More]

Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer 1.4 released

A new version of the Vulkan Hardware Capability Viewer is now available for all platforms (Windows, Linux, Android). This is the biggest update since I released this tool, including lots of new features that also brought along a few changes to the online database. I also decided to drop the “beta” tag now that more than 1,300 reports have been uploaded, making this the first non-beta release of the Vulkan Hardware Capability viewer. [Read More]

Physically based rendering and moving (hdr) assets out of the repository

The last days (and weeks) I’ve been working on a Vulkan example implementing physically based rendering with image based lighting (you can find a nice article with lots of details over at Trent Reed’s blog) and just pushed it to my public github repository. While working on this demo I realized that putting all the binary assets (models and esp. textures) in the repository might not have been a great idea. [Read More]

Updated Vulkan example binaries

Took a bit longer than expected, but I finally got around releasing updated binaries for my open source C++ Vulkan examples. Compared to the last updated (in 2016) there are numerous changes and lots of new examples added. One major addition is touch support on Android. So if you just want to run Vulkan examples (to e.g. test your device) you can grab these pre-built binaries instead of compiling from vulkan. [Read More]

Updated Android vkQuake binaries

For those that want to test out my Android port of of Axel Gneiting’s vkQuake, I have released updates binaries at http://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/vkquake.php Please note that the .apk does not contain any game files, so you need to get the .pak files from the shareware or registered version in order to play this. See the page above for details on this. This release is based on vkQuake’s latest version and is pretty much feature complete. [Read More]