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

Asynchronous loading

The loading of resources is one of the (if not the) slowest operations that can be done in any framework. This is because the files to be loaded are big, and they can come from different sources, such as optical units (DVD and Blu-ray), hard drives, and even the network.

It is another great topic, but the most important concept to understand is the inherent speed necessary to read the memory:

Figure 3.1 – A memory hierarchy

Figure 3.1 – A memory hierarchy

As shown in the preceding diagram, the fastest memory is the registers memory. After registers follows the cache, with different levels and access speeds: both registers and caches are directly in the processing unit (both the CPU and GPU have registers and caches, even with different underlying architectures).

Main memory refers to the RAM, which is the area that is normally populated with the data used by the application. It is slower than the cache, but it is the target of the loading operations...