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 introduced the variable rate shading technique. We gave a brief overview of this approach and how it can be used to improve the performance of some rendering passes without a loss in perceived quality. We also explained the edge detection algorithm used to determine the shading rate for each fragment.

In the next section, we illustrated the changes necessary to enable and use this feature with the Vulkan API. We detailed the options available to change the shading rate at the draw, primitive, and render pass level. We then explained the implementation of the edge detection algorithm using a compute shader and how the result is used to generate the shading rate image.

In the last section, we introduced specialization constants, a mechanism provided by the Vulkan API to modify shader constant values at compile time. We illustrated how this feature can be used to control the group size of compute shaders for optimal performance based on the device our...