Vulkan® tutorials and samples

Vulkan® provides low-level graphics APIs for creating games and other graphics applications. That’s something we can help you with!

Featured tutorials

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.

Understanding Vulkan® Objects

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

Featured presentations

Lessons Learned from Optimising a AAA Vulkan Title on Desktop - Lou Kramer

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The Most Common Vulkan Mistakes - Dominik Witczak (May 2016)

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Vulkan tutorials

Announcing Vulkan Memory Allocator 3.0.0 and Direct3D 12 Memory Allocator 2.0.0

Find out more about the latest releases of VMA and D3DMA – our easy-to-integrate memory allocation libraries for Vulkan® and Direct3D® 12.

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.

Radeon™ GPU Profiler v1.10 introduces GPU cache counters, Vulkan® ray tracing, and more

This latest release adds support for GPU cache counters, Vulkan® ray tracing, the latest RDNA™ 2 GPUs, and more.

Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 3

The final part of this joint series with Quantic Dream discusses shader scalarization, async compute, multithreaded render lists, memory management using our Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA), and much more.

Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 2

Part 2 of this joint post between Quantic Dream and AMD looks at non-uniform resource indexing on PC and for AMD cards specifically.

Porting Detroit: Become Human from PlayStation® 4 to PC – Part 1

Porting the PS4® game Detroit: Become Human to PC presented some interesting challenges. This first part of a joint collaboration from engineers at Quantic Dream and AMD discusses the decision to use Vulkan® and talks shader pipelines and descriptors.

Decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions

A machine-readable mapping that you can integrate into your software for decoding Radeon™ Vulkan® versions. Includes a link to a handy table.

Reducing Vulkan® API call overhead

This guest post, by Arseny Kapoulkine from Roblox, looks at the costs associated with calling various Vulkan functions tens or hundreds of thousands of times per frame, and ways to bring them down.

Stable Barycentric Coordinates

The AMD GCN Vulkan extensions allow developers to get access to the barycentric coordinates at the fragment-shader level.

Understanding Vulkan® Objects

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

Vulkan® and DOOM

This post takes a look at the interesting bits of helping id Software with their DOOM Vulkan effort, from the perspective of AMD’s Game Engineering Team.

AMD Driver Symbol Server

How to set up the AMD Driver Symbol Server in Visual Studio.

Vulkan® Barriers Explained

Vulkan barriers are unique as they requires you to provide what resources are transitioning and also specify a source and destination pipeline stage.

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.

GCN Shader Extensions for Direct3D® and Vulkan®

One of the mandates of GPUOpen is to give developers better access to the hardware, and this post details extensions for Vulkan and Direct3D12 that expose additional GCN features to developers.

Fast Compaction with mbcnt

With shader extensions, we provide access to a much better tool to get compaction done: GCN provides a special op-code for compaction within a wavefront.

Unlock the Rasterizer with Out-of-Order Rasterization

GCN hardware supports a special out-of-order rasterization mode which relaxes the ordering guarantee, and allows fragments to be produced out-of-order.

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.

Vulkan® Renderpasses

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

Vulkan samples

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.

Vulkan® OoORasterization

The Vulkan™ out-of-order rasterization sample shows how to use the out-of-order rasterization extension.

Vulkan® mbcnt Sample

This sample shows how to use the AMD_shader_ballot extension and mbcnt to perform a fast reduction within a wavefront.

GLTFSample Cauldron Sample Project

This sample demonstrates how to use most of Cauldron’s features. It is also a useful reference for getting started with developing your own samples and prototypes.