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

Introducing variable rate shading

Variable rate shading (VRS) is a technique that allows developers to control the rate at which fragments are shaded. When this feature is disabled, all fragments are shaded using a 1x1 rate, meaning that the fragment shader will run for all fragments in the image.

With the introduction of virtual reality (VR) headsets, developers have started to investigate ways to reduce the amount of time it takes to render a frame. This is crucial, not only because VR requires rendering two frames (one for the right eye and one for the left) but also because VR is quite sensitive to frame latency, and higher frame rates are required to avoid users experiencing motion sickness.

One technique that was developed is called foveated rendering: the idea is to render the center of the image at full rate while lowering the quality outside the center. Developers have noticed that users are focused primarily on the central region of the image and don’t notice...