Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (1)
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. Learning Vulkan is a foundational step to understanding how a modern graphics API works, both on desktop and mobile. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll begin by developing the foundations of a rendering framework. You’ll learn how to leverage advanced Vulkan features to write a modern rendering engine. The chapters will cover how to automate resource binding and dependencies. You’ll then take advantage of GPU-driven rendering to scale the size of your scenes and finally, you’ll get familiar with ray tracing techniques that will improve the visual quality of your rendered image. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a modern rendering engine and the graphics techniques employed to achieve state-of-the-art results. The framework developed in this book will be the starting point for all your future experiments.
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

Adding Reflections with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are going to implement reflections using ray tracing. Before ray tracing hardware was introduced, applications implemented reflections using screen-space techniques. However, this technique has drawbacks as it can only use information from what’s visible on the screen. If one of the rays goes outside the visible geometry on the screen, we usually fall back to an environment map. Because of this limitation, the rendered reflections can be inconsistent, depending on the camera position.

By introducing ray tracing hardware, we can overcome this limitation as we now have access to geometry that is not visible on the screen. The downside is that we might need to perform some expensive lighting computations. If the reflected geometry is outside the screen, this means we don’t have the data from the G-buffer and we need to compute the color, light, and shadow data from scratch.

To lower the cost of this technique...