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

Defining and creating a ray tracing pipeline

Now that we have defined our Acceleration Structures, we can turn our attention to ray tracing pipelines. As we mentioned previously, ray tracing shaders work differently compared to traditional graphics and compute shaders. Ray tracing shaders are setup to call other shaders according to the shader binding table setup.

If you are familiar with C++, you can think of this setup as a simple form of polymorphism: the interface of a ray tracing pipeline is always the same, but we can dynamically override which shaders (methods) get called at runtime. We don’t have to define all the entry points though.

In this example, for instance, we are going to define only a ray generation, the closest hit, and the miss shader. We are ignoring any-hit and intersection shaders for now.

As the name implies, the shader binding table can be represented in table form. This is the binding table we are going to build in our example:

...