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

Unlocking and implementing bindless rendering

In the previous chapter, we had to manually bind the textures for each material. This also meant that if we wanted to support different types of materials requiring a different number of textures, we would have needed separate shaders and pipelines.

Vulkan provides a mechanism to bind an array of textures that can be used across multiple shaders. Each texture can then be accessed through an index. In the following sections, we are going to highlight the changes we have made to the GPU device implementation to enable this feature and describe how to use it.

In the following sections, we will first check that the extensions required to enable bindless resources are available on a given GPU. Then we will show the changes required to the descriptor pool creation and descriptor set update to make use of bindless resources. The last step will be to update our shaders to use indices in our texture array for rendering.

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