Vulkan is a new graphics API developed by the Khronos Consortium. It is perceived as a successor to the OpenGL: it is open source and cross-platform. However, as it is possible to use Vulkan on different types of devices and operating systems, there are some differences in the basic setup code we need to create in order to use Vulkan in our application.
In this chapter, we will cover topics that are specific to using Vulkan on Microsoft Windows and Ubuntu Linux operating systems. We will learn Vulkan basics such as downloading the Software Development Kit (SDK) and setting validation layers, which enable us to debug the applications that use the Vulkan API. We will start using the Vulkan Loader library, load all the Vulkan API functions, create a Vulkan Instance, and select the device our work will be executed on.
