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

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...