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

Adding Volumetric Fog

After adding variable rate shading in the previous chapter, we will implement another modern technique that will enhance the visuals of the Raptor Engine: Volumetric Fog. Volumetric rendering and fog are very old topics in rendering literature, but until a few years ago, they were considered impossible for real-time usage.

The possibility of making this technique feasible in real-time stems from the observation that fog is a low-frequency effect; thus the rendering can be at a much lower resolution than the screen, increasing the performance in real-time usage.

Also, the introduction of compute shaders, and thus generic GPU programming, paired with clever observations about approximations and optimizations of the volumetric aspect of the technique, paved the way to unlocking real-time Volumetric Fog.

The main idea comes from the seminal paper by Bart Wronski (https://bartwronski.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/bwronski_volumetric_fog_siggraph2014.pdf) at...