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

Unlocking Async Compute

In this chapter, we are going to improve our renderer by allowing compute work to be done in parallel with graphics tasks. So far, we have been recording and submitting all of our work to a single queue. We can still submit compute tasks to this queue to be executed alongside graphics work: in this chapter, for instance, we have started using a compute shader for the fullscreen lighting rendering pass. We don’t need a separate queue in this case as we want to reduce the amount of synchronization between separate queues.

However, it might be beneficial to run other compute workloads on a separate queue and allow the GPU to fully utilize its compute units. In this chapter, we are going to implement a simple cloth simulation using compute shaders that will run on a separate compute queue. To unlock this new functionality, we will need to make some changes to our engine.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

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