Getting Started

macOS Dependencies

Install the newest XCode from the App Store. This installs the required metal developer tools.
Install the command line tools with xcode-select --install. This might do nothing on your machine.
If xcode-select --print-path prints /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools…
then run sudo xcode-select --switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer.

To run the examples, ensure CMake is installed as it is required for glsl-to-spirv.

Vulkan Dependencies

First, install the x11 and Vulkan dev libraries.

# Fedora
sudo dnf install -y libX11-devel vulkan
# Ubuntu
sudo apt install -y libx11-dev libvulkan-dev libxcb1-dev xorg-dev
# Archlinux
sudo pacman -S vulkan-icd-loader lib32-vulkan-icd-loader vulkan-headers

For Linux, a Vulkan compatible driver must also be installed. For example, the open source mesa-vulkan-drivers for Intel or Radeon gpu's. The proprietary Nvidia drivers support Vulkan out of the box but, as of time of writing, Nouveau users are currenty limited to OpenGL.

Usage

As mentioned befored, gfx is a low-level library, not necessarily intended for beginners. You might want to get a grasp on the fundamental graphics concepts by using wgpu-rs.

A good tutorial for learning how to use gfx is mistodon/gfx-hal-tutorials.

The gfx repository contains a number of examples. Those examples are automatically downloaded when the repository is cloned.

To run an example, simply use cargo run and specify the backend with --features {backend} (where {backend} is one of vulkan, dx12, metal, or gl). For example:

git clone https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx
cd gfx/examples
# macOS
cargo run --bin quad --features metal
# vulkan
cargo run --bin quad --features vulkan
# Windows
cargo run --bin compute --features dx12 1 2 3 4

This would run the quad example using the Vulkan backend, and then the compute example using the Direct3D 12 backend.

Provide feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

Uh oh!