tessellation shader example visual studio project

In this tutorial, we will walk you through the process of setting up a visual studio project for tessellation shaders in Vulkan. Before we begin, it's essential to verify that your graphics card and driver are compatible with Vulkan.

To do this, proceed through the installation process and pay attention to the install location. You don't need to create an account, but having one will give you access to additional documentation that may be helpful during development.

The Vulkan SDK can be downloaded from the LunarG website, which includes a loader for the Vulkan functions, headers, standard validation layers, debugging tools, and more. The most important component you'll need for developing Vulkan applications is the loader itself.

Once you have the SDK installed, follow these steps to set up your environment:

1. Download and install the Vulkan SDK from the LunarG website.

2. Choose the installation location carefully, as this will be the directory where all your Vulkan-related files will be stored.

3. After installation, navigate to the installation directory and find the 'bin' folder, which contains the Vulkan loader executable.

The steps outlined below were written for VS 2017, but you can adapt them to other versions of Visual Studio if needed. For complete C++17 support, you need to use either VS 2019 or later, as earlier versions do not support this standard.

If you're developing for Windows, I will assume that you are using Visual Studio Community Edition. The steps for installing the necessary tools differ slightly between Windows and other operating systems, which is why they are described separately below.

All of the tools we'll use in this tutorial, with the exception of the compiler, are compatible with Windows, Linux, and MacOS. However, the installation process and some configuration settings may vary depending on your platform.

In this chapter, we will set up your environment for developing Vulkan applications and install some useful libraries. By the end of this tutorial, you should have a fully functional visual studio project ready to use for tessellation shaders in Vulkan.

Let's get started!

Tessellation shader example visual studio project