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

Task-based multi-threading using enkiTS

To achieve parallelism, we need to understand some basic concepts and choices that led to the architecture developed in this chapter. First, we should note that when we talk about parallelism in software engineering, we mean the act of executing chunks of code at the same time.

This is possible because modern hardware has different units that can be operated independently, and operating systems have dedicated execution units called threads.

A common way to achieve parallelism is to reason with tasks – small independent execution units that can run on any thread.

Why task-based parallelism?

Multi-threading is not a new subject, and since the early years of it being added to various game engines, there have been different ways of implementing it. Game engines are pieces of software that use all of the hardware available in the most efficient way, thus paving the way for more optimized software architectures.

Therefore, we...