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

Automating pipeline layout generation

In this section, we are going to take advantage of the data provided by the SPIR-V binary format to extract the information needed to create a pipeline layout. SPIR-V is the intermediate representation (IR) that shader sources are compiled to before being passed to the GPU.

Compared to standard GLSL shader sources, which are plain text, SPIR-V is a binary format. This means it’s a more compact format to use when distributing an application. More importantly, developers don’t have to worry about their shaders getting compiled into a different set of high-level instructions depending on the GPU and driver their code is running on.

However, a SPIR-V binary does not contain the final instructions that will be executed by the GPU. Every GPU will take a SPIR-V blob and do a final compilation into GPU instructions. This step is still required because different GPUs and driver versions can produce different assemblies for the same SPIR...