https://www.saschawillems.de/tags/vulkan-examples/ Recent content in vulkan-examples on Sascha Willems Hugo -- gohugo.io de-de webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0100 https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/06/13/new-vulkan-samples-for-using-descriptor-heaps/ Sat, 13 Jun 2026 08:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/06/13/new-vulkan-samples-for-using-descriptor-heaps/ New way of passing data to shaders In Vulkan, data has historically been passed to shaders using descriptors. Managing them can become quite complicated. There are ways to avoid that, such as using buffer device address (obviously for buffers only) or descriptor indexing (aka “bindless”). But until recently, there was no unified way to avoid the complexity around descriptors. This changed a few months ago when VK_EXT_descriptor_heap was introduced. That extension completely overhauls Vulkan’s existing descriptor API, letting you handle descriptors as raw memory. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/17/vulkanised-2026-talk-on-vulkan-for-hobbyists/ Tue, 17 Feb 2026 19:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2026/02/17/vulkanised-2026-talk-on-vulkan-for-hobbyists/ Vulkanised is the largest event dedicated to developers using the Vulkan graphics API. It’s an event packed with brilliant talks and I once again had the honour of being among some of the smartest people in real time graphics programming. At this year’s event I gave a remote talk on Vulkan - Now and then for hobbyists. My goal with this was to look at the decade since Vulkan launched from the eyes of a hobby developer. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/08/15/fundamental-vulkan-samples-rework/ Fri, 15 Aug 2025 08:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/08/15/fundamental-vulkan-samples-rework/ Fundamental Vulkan Samples rework (Sync, command buffers and more) Some history It’s been almost ten years since I started working on my open source C++ Vulkan samples. Never would I have imagined what the coming years would look like. Back then I only knew a bit of OpenGL and very little DirectX. And I wasn’t that proficient in C++ either, my main programming language back then was Delphi (which has become a small niche as of today). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/23/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-hlsl/ Mon, 23 Jun 2025 11:59:41 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/23/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-hlsl/ One of Vulkan’s biggest additions (compared to OpenGL) was the introduction of the SPIR-V intermediate representation for shaders. This makes it possible to use different shader language front-ends for writing your shaders, with the only requirement being to be able to compile that language to valid SPIR-V with Vulkan semantics. Unlike OpenGL (except for GL_ARB_gl_spirv) this no longer confines you to use GLSL for writing Vulkan shaders. And while GLSL is still the primary language for my C++ Vulkan samples, SPIR-V opens up options for different shader languages. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/03/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-slang/ Tue, 03 Jun 2025 12:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2025/06/03/shaders-for-vulkan-samples-now-also-available-in-slang/ A new shading language enters the ring Unlike other 3D graphics apis, Vulkan did decouple human readable shaders from the api using SPIR-V as an intermediate representation. This makes it possible to use different shader language front-ends for writing your shaders, with the only requirement being to be able to compile that shading language to valid SPIR-V with Vulkan semantics. This opens up Vulkan for shading languages other than glsl and made it possible to also add hlsl to most of my samples (back in 2020). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/23/vulkanised-texture-compression-talk/ Sat, 23 Oct 2021 16:00:00 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2021/10/23/vulkanised-texture-compression-talk/ I recently gave a talk on texture compression in Vulkan using Basis Universal and the KTX 2.0 format during this years Vulkanised online event. The short (15 minutes) talk contains some information on texture compression general, using texture compression in Vulkan and why a universal supercompressed format like Basis Universal is important. The presentation and a video recording of all the presentations from day 2, including mine, are now available: https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/11/27/vulkan-samples-and-hardware-capability-viewer-updated-to-final-ray-tracing-extensions/ Fri, 27 Nov 2020 20:15:46 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/11/27/vulkan-samples-and-hardware-capability-viewer-updated-to-final-ray-tracing-extensions/ Vulkan ray tracing extensions final specifications have been released The finalized specifications for the cross-vendor hardware accelerated ray tracing extensions have finally been released, after being available as a provisional extension for some time now. So Vulkan now has official cross-vendor, cross-os support for accessing hardware accelerated ray tracing features. A great overview can be found on the Khronos blog, along with a great article on how ray tracing works. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/06/06/new-vulkan-gltf-examples/ Sat, 06 Jun 2020 15:21:13 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/06/06/new-vulkan-gltf-examples/ Moving to glTF When I started writing my first Vulkan samples glTF was still in it’s infancy, esp. in terms of tooling. So I went with more common formats and went with the Open Asset importer library (Assimp) for loading these. But things rapidly changed with glTF 2.0, which is now pretty much and industry standard and supported by many DCC tools. And since both Vulkan and glTF are both Khronos standards this is a perfect match. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/03/28/vulkan-debug-utilities-sample-and-tutorial/ Sat, 28 Mar 2020 14:00:00 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2020/03/28/vulkan-debug-utilities-sample-and-tutorial/ I have contributed a new sample to the official Khronos Vulkan Samples repository that shows usage of the VK_EXT_debug_utils for adding debugging information to your Vulkan application. This extension combines the old VK_EXT_debug_marker and VK_EXT_debug_report into a new extension that also implements some changes and additions based on developer feedback for the old extensions. For example it’s now possible to debug instance creation and destruction with this new extension. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/27/vulkan-examples-for-ray-traced-shadows-and-reflections-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ Sat, 27 Apr 2019 20:40:09 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/27/vulkan-examples-for-ray-traced-shadows-and-reflections-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ After adding a basic Nvidia RTX ray tracing example last week, I spent some more time with Vulkan and the VK_NV_ray_tracing extension. The result are two new, more advanced examples that I just uploaded to my Vulkan C++ example repository. As with the basic example I tried to keep them as straight forward as possible with all the relevant code parts put into one source file, so that following and building upon is as easy as possible. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/21/new-vulkan-example-on-raytracing-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ Sun, 21 Apr 2019 16:19:22 +0200 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/04/21/new-vulkan-example-on-raytracing-using-vk_nv_ray_tracing/ With all the new Turing extensions that NVIDIA has released alongside it’s new GPU architecture, I decided to replace my GTX 980 with a RTX 2060, mainly for the purpose of doing RTX ray-tracing related Vulkan stuff and also checking out things like mesh and task shaders. Getting my first RTX accelerated ray tracing example up and running was pretty easy, thanks to tutorials like the one from NVIDIA and iOrange. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/29/flipping-the-vulkan-viewport/ Fri, 29 Mar 2019 20:02:24 +0100 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2019/03/29/flipping-the-vulkan-viewport/ Introduction This short tutorial deals with Vulkan’s viewport setup, which differs from the one in OpenGL and other APIs. I’ll try to explain what it takes to get your (OpenGL) scene rendered properly, and how e.g. VK_KHR_MAINTENANCE1 can help you deal with differences across the APIs, something that’s esp. helpful if you try to add Vulkan as a backend to you renderer without wanting to alter your actual scene data. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/05/vulkan-conditional-rendering/ Wed, 05 Sep 2018 18:59:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/09/05/vulkan-conditional-rendering/ Introduction Note: Source code that demonstrates this feature can be found in this new example at my open source C++ Vulkan examples repository. With the new VK_EXT_conditional_rendering extension, Vulkan gains the possibility to execute certain rendering and dispatch commands conditionally, based on values stored in a dedicated buffer. So instead of having to rebuild command buffers if the visibility of objects change, it’s now to possible to just change a single buffer value to control if the rendering commands for that object are executed without the need to touch any command buffers. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/07/19/vulkan-input-attachments-and-sub-passes/ Thu, 19 Jul 2018 17:47:09 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/07/19/vulkan-input-attachments-and-sub-passes/ Introduction I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the use of input attachments and subpasses within a single render pass. Input attachments are image views that can be used for pixel local load operations inside a fragment shader. This basically means that framebuffer attachments written in one subpass can be read from at the exact same pixel (that they have been written) in subsequent subpasses. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/06/08/multiview-rendering-in-vulkan-using-vk_khr_multiview/ Fri, 08 Jun 2018 17:54:50 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/06/08/multiview-rendering-in-vulkan-using-vk_khr_multiview/ I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the use of multiview rendering. Multiview enables rendering to multiple views simultaneously instead of having to use multiple passes. Esp. with stereoscopic rendering (e.g. for VR related applications) there’s usually little change between two views, like different matrices, and having to do multiple passes for such small differences is inefficient. With multiview an implementation can now render different views simultaneously in a single pass and the Vulkan extension even adds hints for the implementation to even further improve performance (see correlation mask down below). https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/04/conservative-rasterization-in-vulkan-using-vk_ext_conservative_rasterization/ Sun, 04 Mar 2018 08:20:19 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2018/03/04/conservative-rasterization-in-vulkan-using-vk_ext_conservative_rasterization/ I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples that demonstrates the basic use of conservative rasterization using the VK_EXT_conservative_rasterization extension. This has been missing from Vulkan some time now (while other APIs already offer this feature) but has recently been added and is already support by at least NVIDIA. Conservative rasterization changes the way fragments are generated, and enabling over estimation generates fragments for every pixel touched instead of only pixels that are fully covered. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/12/30/new-vulkan-example-cascaded-shadow-mapping/ Sat, 30 Dec 2017 19:22:17 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/12/30/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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/16/headless-vulkan-examples/ Sat, 16 Sep 2017 13:26:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/09/16/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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/07/01/ios-and-macos-support-added-to-the-vulkan-examples/ Sat, 01 Jul 2017 10:22:24 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/07/01/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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/04/22/physically-based-rendering-and-moving-hdr-assets-out-of-the-repository/ Sat, 22 Apr 2017 13:42:37 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/04/22/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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/25/updated-vulkan-example-binaries/ Sat, 25 Mar 2017 12:52:59 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2017/03/25/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. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/09/06/updated-vulkan-example-binaries-and-vkquake-for-android/ Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:58:32 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/09/06/updated-vulkan-example-binaries-and-vkquake-for-android/ Finally found some time to update the binaries for my open source ++ Vulkan examples. Since the last binaries have been a few months old these contain lots of changes and new examples. 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.gpuinfo.org : Windows Note : The windows binaries require the media pack (see below) to be present for loading shaders, meshes and textures. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/06/new-vulkan-example-indirect-drawing/ Sat, 06 Aug 2016 11:27:23 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/08/06/new-vulkan-example-indirect-drawing/ I have added another example to my open source C++ Vulkan examples. The new one is about indirect drawing (including multi draw if supported). Contrary to their non-direct counterparts, the indirect drawing commands in Vulkan take their draw calls from a buffer that is ideally stored in device local memory. So instead of running single draw commands that get their index base, index count and instancing numbers passed by the host upon getting called, the indirect commands are backed by a buffer that stores an arbitrary number of draw commands. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/17/new-vulkan-example-deferred-shading-and-shadows/ Sun, 17 Jul 2016 17:11:16 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/17/new-vulkan-example-deferred-shading-and-shadows/ Based on the recently updated deferred shading example, I have added a new example to my open source C++ Vulkan samples. This example adds dynamic shadows from multiple light sources, showcasing a few technologies that can be used to make rendering of multiple shadows more efficient. To achieve this, the example uses a layered depth attachment with one layer per light source that is sampled in the final scene composition. Traditionally one would do multiple passes to render the depth maps for the scene’s light source, and to avoid this the example also uses shader instancing by doing multiple invocations in the geometry shader. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/03/updated-vulkan-deferred-shading-example-video/ Sun, 03 Jul 2016 19:46:10 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/07/03/updated-vulkan-deferred-shading-example-video/ Over the past few weeks and months I’ve been constantly working on my Vulkan examples, enhancing existing demos, adding new ones, fixing bugs reported and merging pull requests (thx to anyone that has contributed!). I even found some time to work on a Vulkn deferred shading playground using Crytek’s famous Sponza model. You can find the repository for it here. This Sunday I decided to visually upgrade the deferred shading example included in my samples repository. https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/04/11/khronos-chapter-munich-vulkan-slides/ Mon, 11 Apr 2016 17:39:46 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/04/11/khronos-chapter-munich-vulkan-slides/ I’ve been speaking about my Vulkan launch day contributions and my experiences moving from OpenGL to Vulkan at the Khronos Munich Chapter Grand Opening last friday at the AMD offices. This was a great event, and finally getting to know some of the people in real was an awesome personal experience. So at this point I’d like to thank all the people that helped make this event happen and all these that attended, had a real blast talking and discussing about Vulkan! https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/03/28/vulkan-examples-update/ Mon, 28 Mar 2016 10:43:12 +0000 webmaster@saschawillems.de (www.saschawillems.de) https://www.saschawillems.de/blog/2016/03/28/vulkan-examples-update/ The last few weeks since the Vulkan launch (one month ago) have been pretty busy. I’ve been adding new examples to to my github repository (almost at 30), fixed some bugs (thanks to everyone that has contributed!) and finally added Android support to all examples (removing the few separate Vulkan Android samples). I also provide pre-built binaries for Windows, Linux and Android (only ARM right now) if you just want to try out the examples at vulkan.