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

Improving shadow memory with Vulkan’s sparse resources

As we mentioned at the end of the last section, we currently allocate the full memory for each cubemap for all the lights. Depending on the screen size of the light, we might be wasting memory as distant and small lights won’t be able to take advantage of the high resolution of the shadow map.

For this reason, we have implemented a technique that allows us to dynamically determine the resolution of each cubemap based on the camera position. With this information, we can then manage a sparse texture and re-assign its memory at runtime depending on the requirements for a given frame.

Sparse textures (sometimes also referred to as virtual textures) can be implemented manually, but luckily, they are supported natively in Vulkan. We are now going to describe how to use the Vulkan API to implement them.

Creating and allocating sparse textures

Regular resources in Vulkan must be bound to a single memory allocation...