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

Taking advantage of specialization constants

Specialization constants are a Vulkan feature that allows developers to define constant values when creating a pipeline. This is particularly useful when the same shader is needed for multiple use cases that differ only for some constant values, for example, materials. This is a more elegant solution compared to pre-processor definitions as they can be dynamically controlled at runtime without having to recompile the shaders.

In our case, we want to be able to control the workgroup size of compute shaders based on the hardware we are running to obtain the best performance:

  1. The first step in the implementation is to determine whether a shader uses specialization constants. We now identify any variables that have been decorated with the following type when parsing the shader SPIR-V:
    case ( SpvDecorationSpecId ):
    {
        id.binding = data[ word_index + 3 ];
        break;
    }
  2. When parsing all the variables...