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

Breaking down large meshes into meshlets

In this chapter, we are going to focus primarily on the geometry stage of the pipeline, the one before the shading stage. Adding some complexity to the geometry stage of the pipeline will pay dividends in later stages as we’ll reduce the number of pixels that need to be shaded.

Note

When we refer to the geometry stage of the graphics pipeline, we don’t mean geometry shaders. The geometry stage of the pipeline refers to input assembly (IA), vertex processing, and primitive assembly (PA). Vertex processing can, in turn, run one or more of the following shaders: vertex, geometry, tessellation, task, and mesh shaders.

Content geometry comes in many shapes, sizes, and complexity. A rendering engine must be able to deal with meshes from small, detailed objects to large terrains. Large meshes (think terrain or buildings) are usually broken down by artists so that the rendering engine can pick out the different levels of details...