Vulkan Alternatives

Vulkan reviews and mentions

• OpenGL is getting mesh shaders as well, via GL_EXT_mesh_shader
  7 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Oct 2025

  So I've been told so I'm trying to take another look at it. At least the examples at https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan, which are probably not 1.3/1.4 yet except for the trianglevulkan13 example, are pure insanity. Coming from CUDA, I can't fathom why what should be simple things like malloc, memcpy and kernel launches, end up needing 300x as many lines.

• Usages for vkCreateHeadlessSurfaceEXT
  2 projects | /r/vulkan | 13 Jul 2023

  Samples in https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan have shown how to use vkCreateHeadlessSurfaceEXT. But these headless samples crash at acquireNextImage from the swapchain. Now I guess the problem lies in the vulkan-wsi-layer.

• offscreen rendering vs render to texture
  1 project | /r/vulkan | 27 Jun 2023

  This is the reference I used. https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/blob/master/examples/hdr/hdr.cpp

• Question about descriptor buffers.
  1 project | /r/vulkan | 26 Jun 2023

  Hi, I'm messing with descriptor buffers but I've came across certain issues I can't seem to solve. I'm using this tutorial as reference. I've tried UBOs and SSBOs, it works perfectly and there is no need to change the buffers offsets when recording a command buffer because I can access them by index like this:

• Need help learning descriptor sets
  1 project | /r/vulkan | 21 Jun 2023

  Hi I am trying to learn Vulkan for an upcoming project and I have so far found everything to be straight forward if very verbose. I have now come to descriptor sets, layout bindings and the so forth and it's got more confusing than I can work out. I have been following this github repo for a headless compute example and it works fine as it is. But when I tried to add an additional storage buffer to the test shader than it comes with I am unable to copy the data over instead just getting a whole collection of 0's.

• Sascha Willems bloom example dependency management
  1 project | /r/vulkan | 13 Jun 2023
• Vulkan ray tracer with fog and stuff
  1 project | /r/vulkan | 30 May 2023

  P.S. do you know of Sascha Willems’ code? https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan

• Proper way to access a read-only texture that has no sampler from an hlsl compute shader?
  2 projects | /r/vulkan | 17 May 2023

  BTW, this problem can be reproduced as described below: - clone https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan.git - build the project and run it with arguments : -v - s hlsl to enable the validation layer and to use hlsl code - run ComputeShader project. The following validation error "Type mismatch on descriptor slot ..." will be shown in the console. - to fix it, as suggested above, you can replace the 3rd line of emboss.comp, sharpen.comp, and edgedetect.comp from: Texture2D inputImage : register(t0); //Creates validation errors to RWTexture2D inputImage : register(u0); //no validation errors (you'll then need to recompile the shaders to spv with a proper hlsl compiler such as Microsoft dxc)

• Recommendations on how to start a small Vulkan project
  6 projects | /r/vulkan | 16 May 2023

  Another way I saw some projects start was by using example base classes (either Sascha Willems' implementations or the framework used by Khronos Samples).

• I've been working on a real-time ray tracing renderer
  2 projects | /r/vulkan | 24 Apr 2023

  It's not a tutorial but I'd recommend Sascha Willems examples. A good next step could be adding models and shadows (see https://github.com/SaschaWillems/Vulkan/tree/master/examples/raytracingshadows). It's a single file but you can easily understand what each function does.

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