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 culling using compute

In the previous section, we demonstrated how to perform back-face and frustum culling on meshlets. In this section, we are going to implement frustum and occlusion culling using compute shaders.

Depending on the rendering pipeline, occlusion culling is usually done through a depth pre-pass, where we write only the depth buffer. The depth buffer can then be used during the G-Buffer pass to avoid shading fragments that we already know are occluded.

The downside of this approach is that we have to draw the scene twice and, unless there is other work that can overlap with the depth pre-pass, have to wait for the depth pre-pass to complete before proceeding to the next step.

The algorithm described in this section was first presented at https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/aaltonenhaar_siggraph2015_combined_final_footer_220dpi.pdf.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Using the depth buffer from the previous frame, we render the visible objects...