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LightweightVK is a deeply refactored fork of IGL which is designed to run on top of Vulkan 1.3 with optional mesh shaders and ray tracing support.

The main goals of LightweightVK:

  1. Lean. Minimalistic API without bloat (no std::vector, std::unordered_map etc in the API).
  2. Bindless. Utilize Vulkan 1.3+ dynamic rendering, descriptor indexing, and buffer device address features for modern bindless-only API design. Ray tracing features are fully integrated with the bindless-only design.
  3. Agile. A playground for experiments to enable quick exploration of ideas and adoption of Vulkan API changes. Designed for rapid prototyping of Vulkan-based renderers.

There are no plans to keep this fork in sync with the upstream.

Supported rendering backends

Supported platforms

API Support

WindowsLinuxMacOSAndroid
Vulkan 1.3:heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark::heavy_exclamation_mark::heavy_check_mark:
Vulkan 1.2:heavy_check_mark:
VK_KHR_acceleration_structure:heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark:
VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline:heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark:
VK_KHR_ray_query:heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark:
VK_EXT_mesh_shader:heavy_check_mark::heavy_check_mark:

On MacOS, features required by LightweightVK are enabled via extensions VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering, VK_EXT_subgroup_size_control, VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state, VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2, and VK_KHR_synchronization2.

:heavy_exclamation_mark: VK_KHR_maintenance4 is not yet supported in MoltenVK :heavy_exclamation_mark:

Check the status of Vulkan 1.3 support in MoltenVK.

Build

Before building, run the deployment scripts:

python3 deploy_content.py
python3 deploy_deps.py

These scripts download external third-party dependencies. Please check LICENSE.md for the full list.

Windows

cd build
cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 17 2022"

Linux

sudo apt-get install clang xorg-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libgles2-mesa-dev libegl1-mesa-dev libglfw3-dev libglew-dev libstdc++-12-dev extra-cmake-modules libxkbcommon-x11-dev wayland-protocols
cd build
cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles"

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Use cmake .. -G "Unix Makefiles" -DLVK_WITH_WAYLAND=ON to build for Wayland, X11 is used by default.

MacOS

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Be sure that VulkanSDK 1.3.296.0 for MacOS is installed https://vulkan.lunarg.com/sdk/home#mac

cd build
cmake .. -G "Xcode"

Android

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Be sure that Android Studio is set up.

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Be sure that the ANDROID_NDK environment variable points to your Android NDK.

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Be sure that the JAVA_HOME environment variable is set to the path of the Java Runtime.

:heavy_exclamation_mark: Be sure that the adb platform tool is in the PATH environment variable.

cd build
cmake .. -DLVK_WITH_SAMPLES_ANDROID=ON
cd android/Tiny                         # or any other sample
./gradlew assembleDebug                 # or assembleRelease

You can also open the project in Android Studio and build it from there.

Before running demo apps on your device, connect the device to a desktop machine and run the deployment script:

python3 deploy_content_android.py

NOTE: To run demos on an Android device, it should support Vulkan 1.3. Please check https://vulkan.gpuinfo.org/listdevices.php?platform=android

NOTE: At the moment, demo apps do not support touch input on Android.

Screenshots

Check out https://github.com/corporateshark/lightweightvk/samples.

image image

Interop with raw Vulkan API calls

The header file lvk/vulkan/VulkanUtils.h offers a collection of functions that allow you to access the underlying Vulkan API objects from LightweightVK handles. This makes it easy to mix LVK and Vulkan code, as shown in the following example:

lvk::Holder<lvk::BufferHandle> vertexBuffer = ctx_->createBuffer({...});
...
lvk::ICommandBuffer& buffer = ctx_->acquireCommandBuffer();
VkCommandBuffer cmdBuf = getVkCommandBuffer(buffer);
VkBuffer buf = getVkBuffer(vertexBuffer);
vkCmdUpdateBuffer(cmdBuf, buf, 0, sizeof(params), &params);
ctx_->submit(buffer, ctx_->getCurrentSwapchainTexture());

If you'd like to add more helper functions, feel free to submit a pull request.

License

LightweightVK is released under the MIT license, see LICENSE.md for the full text as well as third-party library acknowledgements.