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

Recording commands on multiple threads

To record commands using multiple threads, it is necessary to use different command buffers, at least one on each thread, to record the commands and then submit them to the main queue. To be more precise, in Vulkan, any kind of pool needs to be externally synchronized by the user; thus, the best option is to have an association between a thread and a pool.

In the case of command buffers, they are allocated from the associated pool and commands registered in it. Pools can be CommandPools, DescriptorSetPools, and QueryPools (for time and occlusion queries), and once associated with a thread, they can be used freely inside that thread of execution.

The execution order of the command buffers is based on the order of the array submitted to the main queue – thus, from a Vulkan perspective, sorting can be performed on a command buffer level.

We will see how important the allocation strategy for command buffers is and how easy it is to...