Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (1)
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. Learning Vulkan is a foundational step to understanding how a modern graphics API works, both on desktop and mobile. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll begin by developing the foundations of a rendering framework. You’ll learn how to leverage advanced Vulkan features to write a modern rendering engine. The chapters will cover how to automate resource binding and dependencies. You’ll then take advantage of GPU-driven rendering to scale the size of your scenes and finally, you’ll get familiar with ray tracing techniques that will improve the visual quality of your rendered image. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a modern rendering engine and the graphics techniques employed to achieve state-of-the-art results. The framework developed in this book will be the starting point for all your future experiments.
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

Introduction to ray tracing in Vulkan

Ray tracing support in hardware was first introduced in 2018 with the NVidia RTX series. Originally, ray tracing support in Vulkan was only available through an NVidia extension, but later, the functionality was ratified through a Khronos extension to allow multiple vendors to support the ray tracing API in Vulkan. We are dedicating a full chapter just to the setup of a ray tracing pipeline, as it requires new constructs that are specific to ray tracing.

The first departure from the traditional rendering pipeline is the need to organize our scene into Acceleration Structures. These structures are needed to speed up scene traversal, as they allow us to skip entire meshes that the ray has no chance to intersect with.

These Acceleration Structures are usually implemented as a Bounded Volume Hierarchy (BVH). A BVH subdivides the scene and individual meshes into bounding boxes and then organizes them into a tree. Leaf nodes of this tree are the...