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

Summary

In this chapter, we have provided the details on how to use ray tracing in Vulkan. We started by explaining two fundamental concepts:

  • Acceleration Structures: These are needed to speed up scene traversal. This is essential to achieve real-time results.
  • Shader binding tables: Ray tracing pipelines can invoke multiple shaders, and these tables are used to tell the API which shaders to use for which stage.

In the next section, we provided the implementation details to create TLASes and BLASes. We first record the list of geometries that compose our mesh. Next, we use this list to create a BLAS. Each BLAS can then be instanced multiple times within a TLAS, as each BLAS instance defines its own transform. With this data, we can then create our TLAS.

In the third and final section, we explained how to create a ray tracing pipeline. We started with the creation of individual shader types. Next, we demonstrated how to combine these individual shaders into a ray...