What is the SRT equivalent in Vulkan if you don't mind me asking? What about DispatchDraw?
I am not sure how. I do not use Vulkan, I use GNM. I asked this because implementing SRT does not seem possible in a platform independent API. So I checked the docs again and the descriptor layout is the same thing I remember - a set of bindings you manage through a bunch of API calls. On the other hand SRT is a plain c-structure. You pass a pointer to structure to a shader as a parameter. Exactly as same as you pass a structure to a function in C/C++. You don't need APIs to create sturctures, you can store them in a file, you can write them from another shader etc. etc.
> It is unclear to me what exactly DispatchDraw is for, because back-face and offscreen culling are standard features of any graphics pipeline.
It's pretty clear what is it for if you actually wrote real-time graphics. JFYI - it's "index shader" essentially. Having control over indices you can implement much faster culling.
This sounds like indirect draw, which has been standard for years and is supported by Vulkan.
You combine it with a Compute Shader to create the indices. Indirect draw is how you make those indices available to the drawing functionality.