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

Summary

In this chapter, we extended our lighting system to support many point lights with an efficient implementation. We started with a brief history of shadow algorithms, and their benefits and shortcomings, up until some of the most recent techniques that take advantage of raytracing hardware.

Next, we covered our implementation of shadows for many point lights. We explained how cubemaps are generated for each light and the optimizations we implemented to make the algorithm scale to many lights. In particular, we highlighted the culling method we reused from the main geometry pass and the use of a single indirect draw call for each light.

In the last section, we introduced sparse textures, a technique that allows us to dynamically bind memory to a given resource. We highlighted the algorithm we used to determine the contribution of each point light to the scene and how we use that information to determine the resolution of each cubemap. Finally, we demonstrated how to use...