Vulkan pNext and Query for New Additional Structure

Whenever there’s new revision of Vulkan spec, its SDK catches up. We will usually see new structures or function names with suffix of 2.

Let’s take a slightly more complicated than usual to query for new revision structure added from previous spec version. To know whether the device supports separate Depth/Stencil layouts, we need to use vkGetPhysicalDeviceFeatures2 function which involves strcutures VkPhysicalDeviceSeparateDepthStencilLayoutsFeatures, and VkPhysicalDeviceFeatures2 by setting the latter structure’s pNext field to pointer of the former structure.

The following code is how to do it.

    /* remember to set .sType for extension structure to hold the information */
    VkPhysicalDeviceSeparateDepthStencilLayoutsFeatures dsf = {};
    dsf.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_SEPARATE_DEPTH_STENCIL_LAYOUTS_FEATURES;

    /* create a required structure then set its .pNext to the former */
    VkPhysicalDeviceFeatures2 query = {};
    query.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_PHYSICAL_DEVICE_FEATURES_2;
    query.pNext = &dsf;
    vkGetPhysicalDeviceFeatures2(physicalDevice, &query);

Now the following is extra information as if we would likely need to enable such feature on device whenever we create.

    VkDeviceCreateInfo createInfo = {};
    createInfo.sType = VK_STRUCTURE_TYPE_DEVICE_CREATE_INFO;
    createInfo.pNext = &dsf;
    ...
    
    if (vkCreateDevice(physicalDevice, &createInfo, nullptr, &device) != VK_SUCCESS)
        throw std::runtime_error("failed to create device!");

The catch needed to be remember is that sType field of dsf variable above needs to be set. If you didn’t set it, calling vkGetPhysicalDeviceFeatures won’t set any returned value to VkPhysicalDeviceSeparateDepthStencilLayoutsFeatures.

First published on April, 26, 2020

Written by Wasin Thonkaew
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