Developing Vulkan® applications

Vulkan is developed by the Khronos Group, and provides an open standard low-level graphics API for creating graphics applications.

Here on GPUOpen, we not only provide tools and libraries to help you with the development of your Vulkan application, but we’ve produced quite a few detailed blogs and videos to support you along the way too.

Videos

Our engineers regularly present at industry conferences on topics relating to Vulkan.

These links to YouTube videos will usually provide an opportunity to download the slides shown as well.

Don’t miss our other videos about Vulkan and more available here on GPUOpen!

Memory Management in Vulkan® - YouTube link

This talk by AMD's Ste Tovey discusses memory management with Vulkan® at Vulkanised 2018.

Optimising a AAA Vulkan® Title on Desktop

This talk by AMD's Lou Kramer discusses optimising AAA Vulkan® titles on desktop.

Porting Your Engine to Vulkan® or DirectX®12

This talk by AMD's Adam Sawicki at Digital Dragons in 2018 discusses how to port your engine to Vulkan® or DirectX®12.

Blog posts

We have many blog posts covering Vulkan, but those chosen below are a handy introduction to some of the important concepts.

Vulkan® Renderpasses

Renderpasses are objects designed to allow an application to communicate the high-level structure of a frame to the driver.

Using the Vulkan® Validation Layers

Vulkan validation layers make it easier to catch any mistakes, provide useful information beyond basic errors and minimize portability issues.

Using Vulkan® Device Memory

This post serves as a guide on how to best use the various Memory Heaps & Memory Types exposed in Vulkan on AMD drivers, starting with some high-level tips.

Vulkan® Barriers Explained

Barriers control resource and command synchronisation in Vulkan applications and are critical to performance and correctness. Learn more here.

Understanding Vulkan® Objects

An important part of learning the Vulkan® API is to understand what types of objects are defined by it, what they represent and how they relate to each other.

Decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions

A guide to using our machine-readable mapping that you can integrate into your software for decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions.

Vulkan’s Best Practice layer now has AMD-specific checks

Introducing AMD checks for the Vulkan® Best Practice validation layer! Find out more about how it now incorporates many of our performance suggestions.

For more of our blog posts on Vulkan, see further down.

Presentations

These presentations are a great place to start for those new to Vulkan.

Concurrency Model in Explicit Graphics APIs

Dr. Matthäus G. Chajdas and Dominik Baumeister give a (slightly) more in-depth look for people interested in graphics programming. They prepare the mental model for explicit graphics APIs such as DirectX12 and Vulkan.

Memory Management in Vulkan and DX12

Adam Sawicki introduces memory management in Vulkan and DirectX 12 with a detailed presentation on the different memory types, gives some tips and tricks, and discusses the libraries involved.

Don’t miss more presentations on Vulkan and other topics available on GPUOpen!

For more advanced Vulkan developers, take a look here:

D3D12 and Vulkan done right

0.7MB PDF

The most common Vulkan mistakes

1.7MB PDF

Radeon Vulkan version table

We regularly update a table (including a machine-readable XML version) which you can integrate into your application for decoding the version of Vulkan being used in a particular AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition driver.

Decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions

A guide to using our machine-readable mapping that you can integrate into your software for decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions.

Radeon™ Vulkan® Drivers Version Table

A handy table listing the equivalent versions of Vulkan®, Windows Store, and internal drivers for each Radeon Software Adrenalin driver release.

Sample - “HelloVulkan”

Ready to put things into practice? Our “HelloVulkan” sample is a great way to get hands-on and see how everything works.

HelloVulkan Introductory Vulkan® Sample

HelloVulkan is a small, introductory Vulkan® "Hello Triangle" sample which shows how to set up a window, set up a Vulkan context, and render a triangle.

We have more Vulkan samples further down the page too.

Libraries and tools

If you’re looking for some welcome help with allocating and managing memory, our critically acclaimed and widely used Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) library, now available as an optional add-on with the Vulkan SDK, is exactly what you need!

Vulkan® Memory Allocator

VMA is our single-header, MIT-licensed, C++ library for easily and efficiently managing memory allocation for your Vulkan® games and applications.

Our very popular Radeon Developer Tool Suite is a package containing several tools to help you analyze and optimize your Vulkan application, and now includes ray tracing analysis.

AMD Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer

AMD Radeon™ Raytracing Analyzer (RRA) is a tool which allows you to investigate the performance of your raytracing applications and highlight potential bottlenecks.

AMD Radeon™ Memory Visualizer

AMD Radeon™ Memory Visualizer (RMV) is a tool to allow you to gain a deep understanding of how your application uses memory for graphics resources.

AMD Radeon™ GPU Profiler

AMD RGP gives you unprecedented, in-depth access to a GPU. Easily analyze graphics, async compute usage, event timing, pipeline stalls, barriers, bottlenecks, and other performance inefficiencies.

AMD Radeon™ GPU Analyzer

Radeon GPU Analyzer is an offline compiler and performance analysis tool for DirectX®, Vulkan®, SPIR-V™, OpenGL® and OpenCL™.

Don’t forget, you can also find Vulkan support with our FidelityFX effects. We also have other tools and SDKs which support Vulkan.