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

A brief history of clustered lighting

In this section, we are going to explore the background of how clustered lighting came to be and how it has evolved over the years.

In real-time applications, until the early 2000s, the most common way to handle lighting was by using the so-called forward rendering, a technique that renders each object on the screen with all the information needed, including light information. The problem with this approach is that it would limit the number of lights that could be processed to a low number, such as 4 or 8, a number that in the early 2000s would be enough.

The concept of Deferred Rendering, and more specifically, shading the same pixel only once, was already pioneered by Michael Deering and colleagues in a seminal paper called The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics in 1988, even though the term deferred was still not used.

Another key concept, the G-buffer, or geometric buffer, was pioneered...