Let's check out some of the important technical jargons used in Vulkan before we dive deep into the fundamental details. This book will cover more of these technical terms as we proceed further.
- Physical device and device: A system may contain more than one physical Vulkan-capable hardware device. A physical device represents a unique device, whereas a device refers to a logical representation of the physical device in an application.
- Queues: A queue represents an interface between the execution engine and the application. A physical device always contains one or more queues (graphics, compute, DMA/transfer, and so on). A queue's responsibility is to gather the jobs (command buffers) and dispatch them to the physical device for processing.
- Memory type: Vulkan exposes various memory types. At a broader level, there are two types of memory: host and device. As we proceed through this chapter, we will cover these.
- Command: A command is an instruction to do some act. A command can be broadly divided into action, set state, or synchronization.
- Action commands: These can be used to draw primitives, clear a surface, copy a buffer, query/timestamp operations, and begin/end subpass operations. These commands are capable of altering framebuffer attachments, reading or writing into the memory (buffer or image), and writing query pools.
- Set state commands: These help bind the pipelines, descriptor sets, and buffers; they also help set a dynamic state and render a pass/subpass state.
- Synchronization commands: Synchronization helps in satisfying the requirements of two or more action commands, which may compete for resources or have some memory dependencies. This includes setting or waiting for events, inserting the pipeline barrier, and rendering pass/subpass dependencies.
- Command buffer: A command buffer is a collection of commands; it records the commands and submits them to the queues.
In the next section, we will take an overview of Vulkan to help us understand its working model and fundamental basics. We will also understand the command syntax rules get an idea of API commands by simply looking at them.
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