Creating a uniform texel buffer

Uniform texel buffers allow us to read data in a way similar to reading data from images--their contents are interpreted not as an array of single (scalar) values but as formatted pixels (texel) with one, two, three, or four components. But through such buffers, we can access data that is much larger than the data provided through usual images.

We need to specify a VK_BUFFER_USAGE_UNIFORM_TEXEL_BUFFER_BIT usage when we want to use a buffer as a uniform texel buffer.

How to do it...

1. Take the handle of a physical device and store it in a variable of type VkPhysicalDevice named physical_device.
2. Select a format in which the buffer data will be stored. Use the format to initialize a variable of type VkFormat named format.
3. Create a variable of type VkFormatProperties named format_properties.
4. Call vkGetPhysicalDeviceFormatProperties( physical_device, format, &format_properties ) and provide the handle of the physical device, the format variable, and a pointer to the...