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

Rendering Many Lights with Clustered Deferred Rendering

Until now, our scene has been lit by a single point light. While this has worked fine so far as we focused our attention more on laying the foundations of our rendering engine, it’s not a very compelling and realistic use case. Modern games can have hundreds of lights in a given scene, and it’s important that the lighting stage is performed efficiently and within the budget of a frame.

In this chapter, we will first describe the most common techniques that are used both in deferred and forward shading. We will highlight the pros and cons of each technique so that you can determine which one best fits your needs.

Next, we are going to provide an overview of our G-buffer setup. While the G-buffer has been in place from the very beginning, we haven’t covered its implementation in detail. This is a good time to go into more detail, as the choice of a deferred renderer will inform our strategy for clustered...