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

Improving Resources Management

In this chapter, we are going to improve resource management to make it easier to deal with materials that might have a varying number of textures. This technique is usually referred to as bindless, even though it’s not entirely accurate. We are still going to bind a list of resources; however, we can access them by using an index rather than having to specify exactly which resources are going to be used during a particular draw.

The second improvement we are going to make is automating the generation of pipeline layouts. Large projects have hundreds or thousands of shaders, compiled with many different variations depending on the combinations of materials used by a particular application. If developers had to manually update their pipeline layout definitions every time a change is made, very few applications would make it to market. The implementation presented in this chapter relies on the information provided by the SPIR-V binary format.

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