Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (1)
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. Learning Vulkan is a foundational step to understanding how a modern graphics API works, both on desktop and mobile. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll begin by developing the foundations of a rendering framework. You’ll learn how to leverage advanced Vulkan features to write a modern rendering engine. The chapters will cover how to automate resource binding and dependencies. You’ll then take advantage of GPU-driven rendering to scale the size of your scenes and finally, you’ll get familiar with ray tracing techniques that will improve the visual quality of your rendered image. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of the inner workings of a modern rendering engine and the graphics techniques employed to achieve state-of-the-art results. The framework developed in this book will be the starting point for all your future experiments.
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...