vkGetPipelineCacheData

VkGetPipelineCacheData is a function from the Vulkan API that is used to export a pipeline cache object into a binary data object, which can then be stored or transmitted in some way and imported back into a Vulkan implementation at a later time.

The main purpose of this function is to allow a Vulkan pipeline to be cached, either locally within an application or remotely over a network, and then reused when necessary. This can lead to performance improvements by avoiding the overhead of recompiling shaders and creating pipeline properties.

To use vkGetPipelineCacheData, a caller must first create a pipeline cache object by calling vkCreatePipelineCache. The cache object is then used as an argument to vkGetPipelineCacheData, which exports the contents of the cache into a buffer. The pointer to the buffer can then be saved to disk or sent over a network connection, and later used as an argument to vkCreatePipelineCache to import the cached pipeline data.

The buffer returned by vkGetPipelineCacheData is a set of serialized command records that were processed while the pipeline cache that was passed in was live. Each command record in the buffer represents a single instance of a particular pipeline-related operation, and the Vulkan implementation will use it to recreate the necessary state during the call to vkCreatePipelineCache.

The vkGetPipelineCacheData function itself does not allocate any new memory; this function will not reallocate the givenBufferSize memory. If the given pipeline cache has data that is too large to fit into the provided VkBuffer, the function will return an error Vulkan error code.