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

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...