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

Summary

In this chapter, we improved our GPU device implementation to make it easier to manage a large number of textures with bindless resources. We explained which extensions are needed and detailed which changes are required when creating a descriptor set layout to allow the use of bindless resources. We then showed the changes needed when creating a descriptor set to update the array of textures in use.

We then added automatic pipeline layout generation by parsing the SPIR-V binaries generated by the glslang compiler for our shaders. We provided an overview of the SPIR-V binary data format and explained how to parse it to extract the resources bound to a shader, and how to use this information to create a pipeline layout.

Finally, we enhanced our pipeline creation API by adding pipeline caching to improve the load times of our applications after the first run. We presented the Vulkan APIs that are needed to either generate or load the pipeline cache data. We also explained...