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 implemented a frame graph to improve the management of rendering passes and make it easier to expand our rendering pipeline in future chapters. We started by covering the basic concepts, nodes and edges, that define a graph.

Next, we gave an overview of the structure of our graph and how it’s encoded in JSON format. We also mentioned why we went for this approach as opposed to defining the graph fully in code.

In the last part, we detailed how the graph is processed and made ready for execution. We gave an overview of the main data structures used for the graph, and covered how the graph is parsed to create nodes and resources, and how edges are computed. Next, we explained the topological sorting of nodes, which ensures they are executed in the correct order. We followed that with the memory allocation strategy, which allows us to reuse memory from resources that are no longer needed at given nodes. Finally, we provided an overview of the rendering...