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 light clusters

In this section, we are going to describe our implementation of the light clustering algorithm. It’s based on this presentation: https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/2017_Sig_Improved_Culling_final.pdf. The main (and very smart) idea is to separate the XY plane from the Z range, combining the advantages of both tiling and clustering approaches. The algorithms are organized as follows:

  1. We sort the lights by their depth value in camera space.
  2. We then divide the depth range into bins of equal size, although a logarithmic subdivision might work better depending on your depth range.
  3. Next, we assign the lights to each bin if their bounding box falls within the bin range. We only store the minimum and maximum light index for a given bin, so we only need 16 bits for each bin, unless you need more than 65,535 lights!
  4. We then divide the screen into tiles (8x8 pixels, in our case) and determine which lights cover a given tile. Each tile...