Vulkan Validation Layers

• See also: Vulkan Validation Layers

• It’s important to use Vulkan Validation Layers for development.

• Validation Layers are enabled by default in the engine.

• Development without validation layers is pretty much impossible because many bugs are hard to catch otherwise.

• Validation Layers are easily enabled by passing VK_LAYER_KHRONOS_validation to the list of instance extensions when creating VkInstance.

Vulkan Debug Utilities Extension

• The engine also uses Vulkan Debug Utilities Extension (VK_EXT_debug_utils) to register a callback for validation layer messages.

• The validation layer warnings and errors are directly redirected to spdlog output, which is logged both to console and to logfile.

• This extension also allows us to have an internal naming system for Vulkan resources (not to be mixed up with VMA’s internal naming system).

• Furthermore, with this extension labels can be inserted into command buffers and binary tags can be inserted as well for debugging.