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

How screen-space reflections work

Reflections are an important rendering element that can provide a better sense of immersion in the scene. For this reason, developers have developed a few techniques over the years to include this effect, even before ray tracing hardware was available.

One of the most common approaches is to ray-march the scene after the G-buffer data becomes available. Whether a surface will produce reflections is determined by the material’s roughness. Only materials with a low roughness will emit a reflection. This also helps reduce the cost of this technique since usually, only a low number of surfaces will satisfy this requirement.

Ray marching is a technique similar to ray tracing and was introduced in Chapter 10, Adding Volumetric Fog. As a quick reminder, ray marching works similarly to ray tracing. Instead of traversing the scene to determine whether the ray hit any geometry, we move in the ray’s direction by small increments for a fixed...