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

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...