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

To get the most out of this book

This book assumes the reader is familiar with the basic concepts of Vulkan or other modern rendering APIs such as DirectX 12 or Metal. You should be comfortable editing and compiling C or C++ code and GLSL shader code.

Software/hardware covered in the book

Operating system requirements

Vulkan 1.2

Windows or Linux

You will need a C++ compiler that supports C++17. The latest version of the Vulkan SDK also needs to be installed on the system. We provide a Visual Studio solution as well as CMake files to compile the project.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book’s GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

For each chapter, we recommend you run the code and make sure you understand how it works. Each chapter builds on the concepts from the previous one and it is important you have internalized those concepts before moving on. We also suggest making your own changes to experiment with different approaches.