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

Improving ray-traced shadows

In the previous section, we described a simple algorithm that can be used to compute the visibility term in our scene. As we mentioned, this doesn’t scale well for a large number of lights and can require a large number of samples for different types of light.

In this section, we are going to implement a different algorithm inspired by the article Ray Traced Shadows in the Ray Tracing Gems book. As will be common in this chapter and upcoming chapters, the main idea is to spread the computation cost over time.

This can still lead to noisy results, as we are still using a low number of samples. To achieve the quality we are looking for, we are going to make use of spatial and temporal filtering, similar to what we did in Chapter 11, Temporal Anti-Aliasing.

The technique is implemented over three passes, and we are also going to leverage motion vectors. We are now going to explain each pass in detail.

Motion vectors

As we saw in Chapter...