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

Implementing simple ray-traced shadows

As we mentioned in the introduction, shadow mapping techniques have been a staple of real-time rendering for many years. Before the introduction of ray tracing capabilities in GPUs, using other techniques was simply too expensive.

This hasn’t prevented the graphics community from coming up with clever solutions to increase the quality of results while maintaining a low cost. The main issue with traditional techniques is that they are based on capturing depth buffers from the point of view of each light. This works well for objects that are near the light and camera, but as we move further away, depth discontinuities lead to artefacts in the final result.

Solutions to this problem include filtering the result – for instance, using Percentage Closer Filtering (PCF) or Cascade Shadow Maps (CSM). This technique requires capturing multiple depth slices – the cascades to maintain enough resolution as we move further away from...