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 Variable Rate Shading

In this chapter, we are going to implement a technique that has become quite popular recently: variable rate shading. This technique allows developers to specify at which rate to shade individual pixels while maintaining the same perceived visual quality. This approach allows us to reduce the time taken for some rendering passes, and the time savings can be used to implement more features or render at higher resolutions.

Vulkan provides multiple options to integrate this technique into an application, and we are going to provide an overview of all of them. This feature is provided through an extension that is supported only on recent hardware, but it’s possible to implement it manually using compute shaders. We won’t cover this option here, but we are going to point you to the relevant resources in the Further reading section.

In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:

  • Introducing variable rate shading...