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

Implementing a G-buffer

From the beginning of this project, we decided we would implement a deferred renderer. It’s one of the more common approaches, and some of the render targets will be needed in later chapters for other techniques:

  1. The first step in setting up multiple render targets in Vulkan is to create the framebuffers – the textures that will store the G-buffer data – and the render pass.

This step is automated, thanks to the frame graph (see Chapter 4, Implementing a Frame Graph, for details); however, we want to highlight our use of a new Vulkan extension that simplifies render pass and framebuffer creation. The extension is VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering.

Note

This extension has become part of the core specification in Vulkan 1.3, so it’s possible to omit the KHR suffix on the data structures and API calls.

  1. With this extension, we don’t have to worry about creating the render pass and framebuffers ahead of time...