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

Summary

In this chapter, we have introduced the concept of meshlets, a construct that helps us break down large meshes into more manageable chunks and that can be used to perform occlusion computations on the GPU. We have demonstrated how to use the library of our choice (MeshOptimizer) to generate meshlets, and we also illustrated the extra data structures (cones and bounding spheres) that are useful for occlusion operations.

We introduced mesh and task shaders. Conceptually similar to compute shaders, they allow us to quickly process meshlets on the GPU. We demonstrated how to use task shaders to perform back-face and frustum culling, and how mesh shaders replace vertex shaders by processing and generating multiple primitives in parallel.

Finally, we went through the implementation of occlusion culling. We first listed the steps that compose this technique. Next, we demonstrated how to compute a depth pyramid from our existing depth buffer. Lastly, we analyzed the occlusion...