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

Summary

In this chapter, we extended our lighting system to support many point lights with an efficient implementation. We started with a brief history of shadow algorithms, and their benefits and shortcomings, up until some of the most recent techniques that take advantage of raytracing hardware.

Next, we covered our implementation of shadows for many point lights. We explained how cubemaps are generated for each light and the optimizations we implemented to make the algorithm scale to many lights. In particular, we highlighted the culling method we reused from the main geometry pass and the use of a single indirect draw call for each light.

In the last section, we introduced sparse textures, a technique that allows us to dynamically bind memory to a given resource. We highlighted the algorithm we used to determine the contribution of each point light to the scene and how we use that information to determine the resolution of each cubemap. Finally, we demonstrated how to use...