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

GPU-Driven Rendering

In this chapter, we will upgrade the geometry pipeline to use the latest available technology: mesh shaders and meshlets. The idea behind this technique is to move the flow of mesh rendering from the CPU to the GPU, moving culling and draw command generation into different shaders.

We will first work on the mesh structure on the CPU, by separating it into different meshlets that are groups of up to 64 triangles, each with an individual bounding sphere. We will then use compute shaders to perform culling and write a list of commands to draw the meshlets in the different passes. Finally, we will use the mesh shaders to render the meshlets. There will also be a compute version provided, as mesh shaders are still available only on Nvidia GPUs for now.

Traditionally, geometry culling has been performed on the CPU. Each mesh on the scene is usually represented by an axis aligned bounding box (AABB). An AABB can easily be culled against the camera frustum, but...