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

Improving banding

Banding is a problem affecting various steps in the rendering of a frame. It affects Volumetric Fog and lighting calculations, for example.

Figure 11.5 – Banding problem detail in Volumetric Fog

Figure 11.5 – Banding problem detail in Volumetric Fog

We can see in Figure 11.5 how this can be present in Volumetric Fog if no solution is implemented. A solution to remove banding in visuals is to add some dithering to various passes of the frame, but that also adds visual noise to the image.

Dithering is defined as the intentional addition of noise specifically to remove banding. Different type of noises can be used, as we will see in the accompaining code. Adding temporal reprojection smoothens the noise added, thus becoming one of the best ways to improve the visual quality of the image.

In Chapter 10, Adding Volumetric Fog, we saw a very simple temporal reprojection scheme, and we have also added noise to various steps of the algorithm. We have now seen a more complex implementation...