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

Implementing ray-traced reflections

In this section, we are going to leverage the hardware ray tracing capabilities to implement reflections. Before diving into the code, here’s an overview of the algorithm:

  1. We start with the G-buffer data. We check whether the roughness for a given fragment is below a certain threshold. If it is, we move to the next step. Otherwise, we don’t process this fragment any further.
  2. To make this technique viable in real time, we cast only one reflection ray per fragment. We will demonstrate two ways to pick the reflection’s ray direction: one that simulates a mirror-like surface and another that samples the GGX distribution for a given fragment.
  3. If the reflection ray hits some geometry, we need to compute its surface color. We shoot another ray toward a light that has been selected through importance sampling. If the selected light is visible, we compute the color for the surface using our standard lighting model.
  4. ...