Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (1)
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. Learning Vulkan is a foundational step to understanding how a modern graphics API works, both on desktop and mobile. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll begin by developing the foundations of a rendering framework. You’ll learn how to leverage advanced Vulkan features to write a modern rendering engine. The chapters will cover how to automate resource binding and dependencies. You’ll then take advantage of GPU-driven rendering to scale the size of your scenes and finally, you’ll get familiar with ray tracing techniques that will improve the visual quality of your rendered image. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a modern rendering engine and the graphics techniques employed to achieve state-of-the-art results. The framework developed in this book will be the starting point for all your future experiments.
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 load times with a pipeline cache

Each time we create a graphics pipeline and, to a lesser extent, a compute pipeline, the driver has to analyze and compile the shaders we have provided. It also has to inspect the state we have defined in the creation structure and translate it into instructions to program the different units of the GPU. This process is quite expensive, and it’s one of the reasons why, in Vulkan we have to define most of the pipeline state upfront.

In this section, we are going to add pipeline caching to our GPU device implementation to improve loading times. If your application has to create thousands of pipelines, it can incur a significant startup time or, for a game, long loading times between levels.

The technique described in this section will help to reduce the time spent creating pipelines. The first change you will notice is that the GpuDevice::create_pipeline method accepts a new optional parameter that defines the path of a pipeline...