/VulkanCore

Vulkan graphics and compute API bindings for .NET Standard

Primary LanguageC#MIT LicenseMIT

VulkanCore

NuGet Pre Release Vulkan .NET Standard AppVeyor Build Status Travis Build Status

Introduction

VulkanCore is a thin cross-platform object-oriented wrapper around the Vulkan C API. It supports .NET Core, .NET Framework and Mono.

Why yet another set of bindings? While most of the alternatives use a generator-based approach, these bindings do not. This means:

Pros:

  • Full control over the API including high quality code documentation
  • Easier to contribute - no need to understand a generator

Cons:

  • Requires manual work to keep up to date with the Vulkan API registry
  • Cumbersome to modify the fundamentals - impossible to simply regenerate everything

Building

Visual Studio 2017 or equivalent tooling is required to successfully compile the source. The tooling must support the new .csproj format and C# 7 language features. Latest Rider, Visual Studio Code or MonoDevelop should all work but have not been tested.

Samples

Vulkan-capable graphics hardware and drivers are required to run the samples. Win32 samples are based on WinForms (.NET Framework) and Android ones on Xamarin (Mono).

ClearScreen ClearScreen

Sets up a window and clears it to a solid color

ColoredTriangle ColoredTriangle

Renders a colored triangle defined in a vertex shader

TexturedCube TexturedCube

Creates a rotating textured cube mesh

ComputeParticles ComputeParticles

Simulates 2D particles using a compute shader

Tests

In order to provide a certain level of functional correctness, the project aims to achieve full statement coverage for the core API. Tests are built using xUnit and .NET Core and have been tested on Ubuntu and Windows platforms.

Note that it's difficult to test vendor specific extensions due to requirements for specialized hardware/drivers - therefore, covering them at this point is not planned.

Related Work