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Vulkan Best Practice for Mobile Developers

This project has been donated to Khronos Group. Development has now moved to:

Vulkan-Samples

Please open issues and pull requests there.

Introduction

The Vulkan Best Practice for Mobile Developers is collection of resources to help you develop optimized Vulkan applications for mobile platforms.

Goals

Create a collection of resources that demonstrate best-practice recommendations in Vulkan
Create tutorials that explain the implementation of best-practices and include performance analysis guides
Create a framework that can be used as reference material and also as a sandbox for advanced experimentation with Vulkan

Disclaimer: This project covers advanced Vulkan concepts. If you are new to Vulkan here are a few links to get you started:

Beginners Guide to Vulkan

Get Started in Vulkan

Tutorials

Project Basics
Vulkan Essentials
- How does Vulkan compare to OpenGL ES? What should you expect when targeting Vulkan?
Vulkan Swapchains
- Appropriate use of N-buffering
- Appropriate use of surface rotation
Pipelines
- Use of pipeline caches to avoid startup latency
- Utilizing Specialization Constants
Descriptors
- Descriptor and buffer management
Render Passes
- Appropriate use of load/store operations, and use of transient attachments
- Choosing the correct layout when transitioning images
Render Subpasses
- Benefits of subpasses over multiple render passes, use of transient attachments, and G-buffer recommended size
Workload Synchronization
- Using pipeline barriers efficiently
- How to synchronize back to the CPU and avoid stalling
Command Buffers
- Allocation and management of command buffers
- Multi-threaded recording with secondary command buffers
AFBC
- Appropriate use of AFBC
Misc

Setup

Clone the repo with submodules using the following command:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ARM-software/vulkan_best_practice_for_mobile_developers.git
cd vulkan_best_practice_for_mobile_developers

Follow build instructions for your platform below.

Build

Supported Platforms

Windows - Build Guide
Linux - Build Guide
macOS - Build Guide
Android - Build Guide

Usage

The following shows some example command line usage on how to configure and run the Vulkan Best Practices.

# Run Swapchain Images sample
vulkan_best_practice swapchain_images

# Run AFBC sample in benchmark mode for 5000 frames
vulkan_best_practice --sample afbc --benchmark 5000

# Run bonza test offscreen
vulkan_best_practice --test bonza --hide

# Run all the performance samples
vulkan_best_practice --batch performance

Tests

System Test - Usage Guide
Generate Sample - Usage Guide

License

See LICENSE.

This project has some third-party dependencies, each of which may have independent licensing:

astc-encoder: ASTC Evaluation Codec
CTPL: Thread Pool Library
docopt: A C++11 port of the Python argument parsing library
glfw: A multi-platform library for OpenGL, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, window and input
glm: OpenGL Mathematics
glslang: Shader front end and validator
dear imgui: Immediate Mode Graphical User Interface
- dear imgui shaders: GLSL shaders for dear imgui
HWCPipe: Interface to mobile Hardware Counters
KTX-Software: Khronos Texture Library and Tools
spdlog: Fast C++ logging library
SPIRV-Cross: Parses and converts SPIR-V to other shader languages
stb: Single-file public domain (or MIT licensed) libraries
tinygltf: Header only C++11 tiny glTF 2.0 library
- nlohmann json: C++ JSON Library (included by tinygltf)
vma: Vulkan Memory Allocator
volk: Meta loader for Vulkan API
vulkan: Sources for the formal documentation of the Vulkan API

This project uses the following 3D models. Each one has its own licence.

Sponza: CC BY 3.0 license with the following modifications:
- All textures are converted to ASTC in .ktx format.
- Converted to gltf using Blender exporter.
Bonza: MIT license
Space Module: MIT license

Sponza model downloaded from Morgan McGuire's Computer Graphics Archive.

Fonts downloaded from Google Fonts, under license Apache 2.0

PBR References:

Trademarks

Vulkan is a registered trademark of the Khronos Group Inc.

Contributions

All contributions are accepted under the same LICENSE.

Related resources

Mali GPU Best Practices: A document with recommendations for efficient API usage
PerfDoc: A Vulkan layer which aims to validate applications against Mali GPU Best Practices