Since July 2017 I develop Vulkan Memory Allocator (VMA) – a C++ library that helps with memory management in games and other applications using Vulkan. But because I deal with both Vulkan and DirectX 12 in my everyday work, I think it’s a good idea to compare them.

This is an article about a very specific topic. It may be useful to you if you are a programmer working with both graphics APIs – Direct3D 12 and Vulkan. These two APIs offer a similar set of features and performance. Both are the new generation, explicit, low-level interfaces to the modern graphics hardware (GPUs), so we could compare them back-to-back to show similarities and differences, e.g. in naming things. For example, ID3D12CommandQueue::ExecuteCommandLists function has Vulkan equivalent in form of vkQueueSubmit function. However, this article focuses on just one aspect – memory management, which means the rules and limitation of GPU memory allocation and the creation of resources – images (textures, render targets, depth-stencil surfaces etc.) and buffers (vertex buffers, index buffers, constant/uniform buffers etc.) Chapters below describe pretty much all the aspects of memory management that differ between the two APIs.

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