Unlocking and implementing bindless rendering
In the previous chapter, we had to manually bind the textures for each material. This also meant that if we wanted to support different types of materials requiring a different number of textures, we would have needed separate shaders and pipelines.
Vulkan provides a mechanism to bind an array of textures that can be used across multiple shaders. Each texture can then be accessed through an index. In the following sections, we are going to highlight the changes we have made to the GPU device implementation to enable this feature and describe how to use it.
In the following sections, we will first check that the extensions required to enable bindless resources are available on a given GPU. Then we will show the changes required to the descriptor pool creation and descriptor set update to make use of bindless resources. The last step will be to update our shaders to use indices in our texture array for rendering.
