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

Introducing variable rate shading

Variable rate shading (VRS) is a technique that allows developers to control the rate at which fragments are shaded. When this feature is disabled, all fragments are shaded using a 1x1 rate, meaning that the fragment shader will run for all fragments in the image.

With the introduction of virtual reality (VR) headsets, developers have started to investigate ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to render a frame. This is crucial, not only because VR requires rendering two frames (one for the right eye and one for the left) but also because VR is quite sensitive to frame latency, and higher frame rates are required to avoid users experiencing motion sickness.

One technique that was developed is called foveated rendering: the idea is to render the center of the image at full rate while lowering the quality outside the center. Developers have noticed that users are focused primarily on the central region of the image and don’t notice...