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

Understanding task and mesh shaders

Before we begin, we should mention that mesh shaders can be used without task shaders. If, for instance, you wanted to perform culling or some other pre-processing step on the meshlets on the CPU, you are free to do so.

Also, note that task and mesh shaders replace vertex shaders in the graphics pipeline. The output of mesh shaders is going to be consumed by the fragment shader directly.

The following diagram illustrates the differences between the traditional geometry pipeline and the mesh shader pipeline:

Figure 6.4 – The difference between traditional and mesh pipeline

Figure 6.4 – The difference between traditional and mesh pipeline

In this section, we are going to provide an overview of how task and mesh shaders work and then use this information to implement back-face and frustum culling using task shaders.

Both task and mesh shaders use the same execution model of compute shaders, with some minor changes. The output of task shaders is consumed directly by a mesh...