Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (2)
By: Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone

Overview of this book

Vulkan is now an established and flexible multi-platform graphics API. It has been adopted in many industries, including game development, medical imaging, movie productions, and media playback but learning it can be a daunting challenge due to its low-level, complex nature. Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan is designed to help you overcome this difficulty, providing a practical approach to learning one of the most advanced graphics APIs. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll focus on building a high-performance rendering engine from the ground up. You’ll explore Vulkan’s advanced features, such as pipeline layouts, resource barriers, and GPU-driven rendering, to automate tedious tasks and create efficient workflows. Additionally, you'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like mesh shaders and real-time ray tracing, elevating your graphics programming to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of modern rendering engines to confidently handle large-scale projects. Whether you're developing games, simulations, or visual effects, this guide will equip you with the skills and knowledge to harness Vulkan’s full potential.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of a Modern Rendering Engine
7
Part 2: GPU-Driven Rendering
13
Part 3: Advanced Rendering Techniques

Improving shadow memory with Vulkan’s sparse resources

As we mentioned at the end of the last section, we currently allocate the full memory for each cubemap for all the lights. Depending on the screen size of the light, we might be wasting memory as distant and small lights won’t be able to take advantage of the high resolution of the shadow map.

For this reason, we have implemented a technique that allows us to dynamically determine the resolution of each cubemap based on the camera position. With this information, we can then manage a sparse texture and re-assign its memory at runtime depending on the requirements for a given frame.

Sparse textures (sometimes also referred to as virtual textures) can be implemented manually, but luckily, they are supported natively in Vulkan. We are now going to describe how to use the Vulkan API to implement them.

Creating and allocating sparse textures

Regular resources in Vulkan must be bound to a single memory allocation...