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

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...