Learn Modern Vulkan in 2 Hours (Dynamic Rendering, No Render Passes!)

You often hear people talking about how hard Vulcan is and how it takes so much code just to get to a triangle. And while that's true, there is a lot of code and Vulcan can be hard, I think the hardest part about learning Vulcan is the lack of clear and easy to follow tutorials and code samples. This was my motive for putting together this hefty video. Everything you need to go from zero to your first triangle in one easy to follow lesson with a focus on modern Vulcan features. Many tutorials, even recent ones, still use Vulcan 1.0 era features, which can nowadays be replaced by their new and improved counterparts. There are also too many concepts introduced at once, far more than is needed to put pixels on the screen, which can leave you with many points of failure when you're just starting out. Even recent learning materials aren't without their issues. I recently went through the How to Vulcan 2006 guide, and though it's quite good, it does leave out some sections that forced me to poke through the source code, which I could only make sense of because I've already worked with Vulcan. I personally have a very hard time learning from code like this. Everything is just plopped inside of main. There's nothing to break up the complexity or help demonstrate the various phases of Vulcan initialization and rendering. The comments that are there might as well just be line breaks as they don't tell me anything. And speaking of line breaks, there aren't even those in this file, which makes me really struggle to want to read this. I do truly appreciate the work that gets put into these materials, but can we agree that educational materials need to be a little more beginner-friendly? With that said, I'm going to take a stab at presenting an absolute minimal and modern Vulcan example that beginners can use to try and get to the holy triangle with less pain and confusion than what has been offered until now. We'll do this by only focusing on the features we need to achieve this goal. As we add more features like model loading, texturing, lighting, materials, etc., I'll introduce the Vulcan features that we need and and that are best suited for the task at hand. Essentially, I'd like to tackle specific milestones with each video, not introducing just particular parts of the API. And speaking of the API, the Khronos Group has put a lot of effort into improving Vulcan since its initial release. This is why anybody starting today should focus on using the core extensions on offer with the latest version of Vulcan. That being 1.4 at the time of recording. Many pain points have been addressed with additions to the API or improvements over existing API. We'll address these as we move forward and look at what the alternative was in the 1.0 era of Vulcan.