VkPhysicalDeviceMemoryPropertiesmemoryTypes

VkPhysicalDevice is an opaque handle representing a physical device (GPU or other accelerator) that is available to a Vulkan instance. It refers to the actual hardware present in the system, as opposed to the logical device (VkDevice) that applications create to perform work on that hardware. A Vulkan application selects a suitable VkPhysicalDevice from those reported by the implementation.

To discover physical devices, an application creates a Vulkan instance and calls vkEnumeratePhysicalDevices, which yields one or more VkPhysicalDevice handles. For each device, a series of queries reveals its capabilities: vkGetPhysicalDeviceProperties returns basic identifiers such as deviceName, vendorID, deviceID, deviceType (discrete, integrated, virtual, CPU), and apiVersion; vkGetPhysicalDeviceFeatures reports supported operations like shader capabilities and numeric features; vkGetPhysicalDeviceMemoryProperties describes memory heaps and memory types. The number and configuration of queue families are obtained with vkGetPhysicalDeviceQueueFamilyProperties, indicating what kinds of operations (graphics, compute, transfer) can be submitted and how many queues are available in each family.

Applications may also query device-level extensions with vkEnumerateDeviceExtensionProperties and, for memory considerations, the details in VkPhysicalDeviceMemoryProperties. For presentation support, per-queue-family checks against a surface using vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceSupportKHR (from the VK_KHR_surface extension) determine if a given queue can present images to a window system surface.

The data gathered from these queries guides device selection and the creation of a logical device (VkDevice) with required features and extensions enabled. VkPhysicalDevice is thus the first-class representation of hardware in Vulkan, serving as the source from which capabilities and limits are exposed to the application.