In this episode, we dive into Vulkan by creating our first Vulkan instance. This is the entry point to the Vulkan API and is required before we can do anything else with the graphics system.

What We’ll Cover

• Understanding Vulkan’s architecture
• Creating a Vulkan instance
• Setting up validation layers for debugging
• Querying available extensions

Prerequisites

Make sure you’ve completed Episode 2: Window Creation before continuing.

Git Tag

This episode corresponds to git tag v0.3.0 in the Serval Engine repository.

git checkout v0.3.0

Understanding Vulkan

Vulkan is a low-level graphics API that gives us explicit control over the GPU. Unlike OpenGL, Vulkan requires us to be very explicit about what we want to do, which results in more boilerplate code but also better performance and more predictable behavior.

Next Episode

In the next episode, we’ll select a physical device (GPU) and create a logical device for rendering.

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This is a placeholder episode. Content will be updated as the engine development progresses.