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

Getting Started with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are introducing ray tracing into our rendering pipeline. Thanks to the addition of hardware support for ray tracing in modern GPUs, it’s now possible to integrate ray tracing techniques into real-time rendering.

Ray tracing requires a different setup compared to the traditional rendering pipeline, which is why we are dedicating a whole chapter to setting up a ray tracing pipeline. We are going to cover in detail how to set up a shader binding table to tell the API which shaders to invoke when an intersection test for a given ray succeeds or fails.

Next, we are going to explain how to create the Bottom Level Acceleration Structure (BLAS) and Top Level Acceleration Structure (TLAS). These Acceleration Structures (AS) are needed to speed up scene ray traversal and ensure that ray tracing can be performed at an interactive rate.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

  • Introduction to ray...