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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the concept of task-based parallelism and saw how using a library such as enkiTS can quickly add multi-threading capabilities to the Raptor Engine.

We then learned how to add support for loading data from files to the GPU using an asynchronous loader. We also focused on Vulkan-related code to have a second queue of execution that can run in parallel to the one responsible for drawing. We saw the difference between primary and secondary command buffers.

We talked about the importance of the buffer’s allocation strategy to ensure safety when recording commands in parallel, especially taking into consideration command reuse between frames.

Finally, we showed step by step how to use both types of command buffers, and this should be enough to add the desired level of parallelism to any application that decides to use Vulkan as its graphics API.

In the next chapter, we will work on a data structure called Frame Graph, which will...