A pipeline is an object storing the GPU state needed to execute shaders

They come in two flavors:

• Graphics Pipeline : for draw calls (vertex → raster → fragment).
• Compute Pipeline : for dispatch calls (single compute shader).

They have in common, for each pipeline :

• A collection of resources stored in descriptor sets for the shaders.
• A least one shader module

Note

A pipeline is tied to the configured shader modules, which means that you need one pipeline for each set of shaders.