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 presented two implementations for ray-traced shadows. In the first section, we provided a simple implementation similar to what you might find in an offline renderer. We simply shoot one ray per fragment to each light to determine whether it’s visible or not from that position.

While this works well for point lights, it would require many rays to support other light types and render soft shadows. For this reason, we also provided an alternative that makes use of spatial and temporal information to determine how many samples to use per light.

We start by computing the visibility variance of the past four frames. We then filter this value to determine how many rays to shoot for each fragment for each light. We use this count to traverse the scene and determine the visibility value for each fragment. Finally, we filter the visibility we obtained to reduce the noise. The filtered visibility is then used in the lighting computation to determine...