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

Further reading

We only gave a brief overview of the Vulkan APIs for variable rate shading. We recommend reading the specification for further details: https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/1.3-extensions/html/vkspec.html#primsrast-fragment-shading-rate.

Most of the resources available online seem to be focused on the DirectX API, but the same approach can be translated to Vulkan. This blog post provides some details on the benefits of VRS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading-a-scalpel-in-a-world-of-sledgehammers/.

These two videos provide in-depth details on integrating VRS into existing game engines. The section on how to implement VRS using compute shader is particularly interesting:

This article illustrates how VRS can also have other use cases, for instance, to accelerate raytracing: https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2022/05/29/accelerating...