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

Further reading

The technique we have implemented in this chapter is detailed in Chapter 13, Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing, of the book Ray Tracing Gems. It is freely available here: http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg/index.html.

We have only used a limited set of the GLSL APIs available for ray tracing. We recommend reading the GLSL extension specification to see all the options available:

We used a few filters in this chapter. Signal processing is a vast and wonderful field that has more implications in graphics programming than people realize. To get you started, we recommend this article by Bart Wronski: https://bartwronski.com/2021/02/15/bilinear-down-upsampling-pixel-grids-and-that-half-pixel-offset/.