Is there a Vulkan equivalent to OpenGL's pixel buffer object?

Question

I did some Googling and it does not appear that Vulkan has a Pixel Buffer Object. Is there something analogous to it in the Vulkan API?

Answer 1

OpenGL doesn't "have a Pixel Buffer Object" either. What OpenGL has is memory, aka: buffer objects. One of the uses of buffer objects is as the source/destination for pixel transfer operations; when used with buffer objects, they can execute asynchronously. While doing this is commonly called "pixel buffer objects", it's not a special object. It's just using OpenGL-allocated memory to perform an asynchronous copy of image data into/outof a buffer object.

OpenGL needs a special system for that because it is inherently a synchronous API. By contrast, almost nothing in Vulkan is synchronous. So Vulkan doesn't need a special system for doing it.

vkCmdCopyImageToBuffer is a Vulkan command, as identified because it starts with vkCmd. As such, it is not executed immediately; such commands are stored in Vulkan command buffers, to be executed by the GPU asynchronously.

Vulkan doesn't have a special system for doing asynchronous pixel copies because Vulkan operations are by default asynchronous. And unlike OpenGL, it will not try to hide this from you.