zmichaels11 / volk

Meta loader for Vulkan API

🐺 volk

Purpose

volk is a meta-loader for Vulkan. It allows you to dynamically load entrypoints required to use Vulkan without linking to vulkan-1.dll or statically linking Vulkan loader. Additionally, volk enables loading Vulkan entrypoints directly from the driver which can increase performance by skipping loader dispatch overhead.

volk is written in C89 and supports Windows, Linux and Android.

Building

volk comes with one header and source file; to build it, just add the source file, volk.c, to your build system.

To use volk, you have to include volk.h instead of vulkan/vulkan.h; this is necessary to use function definitions from volk. If some files in your application include vulkan/vulkan.h and don't include volk.h, this can result in symbol conflicts; consider defining VK_NO_PROTOTYPES when compiling code that uses Vulkan to make sure this doesn't happen.

Basic usage

To initialize volk, call this function first:

VkResult volkInitialize();

This will attempt to load Vulkan loader from the system; if this function returns VK_SUCCESS you can proceed to create Vulkan instance. If this function fails, this means Vulkan loader isn't installed on your system.

After creating the Vulkan instance using Vulkan API, call this function:

void volkLoadInstance(VkInstance instance);

This function will load all required Vulkan entrypoints, including all extensions; you can use Vulkan from here on as usual.

Optimizing device calls

If you use volk as described in the previous section, all device-related function calls, such as vkCmdDraw, will go through Vulkan loader dispatch code. This allows you to transparently support multiple VkDevice objects in the same application, but comes at a price of dispatch overhead which can be as high as 7% depending on the driver and application.

To avoid this, you have one of two options:

1. For applications that use just one VkDevice object, load device-related Vulkan entrypoints directly from the driver with this function:

void volkLoadDevice(VkDevice device);

2. For applications that use multiple VkDevice objects, load device-related Vulkan entrypoints into a table:

void volkLoadDeviceTable(struct VolkDeviceTable* table, VkDevice device);

The second option requires you to change the application code to store one VolkDeviceTable per VkDevice and call functions from this table instead.

License

This library is available to anybody free of charge, under the terms of MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2018 Arseny Kapoulkine

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
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