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 introduced the variable rate shading technique. We gave a brief overview of this approach and how it can be used to improve the performance of some rendering passes without a loss in perceived quality. We also explained the edge detection algorithm used to determine the shading rate for each fragment.

In the next section, we illustrated the changes necessary to enable and use this feature with the Vulkan API. We detailed the options available to change the shading rate at the draw, primitive, and render pass level. We then explained the implementation of the edge detection algorithm using a compute shader and how the result is used to generate the shading rate image.

In the last section, we introduced specialization constants, a mechanism provided by the Vulkan API to modify shader constant values at compile time. We illustrated how this feature can be used to control the group size of compute shaders for optimal performance based on the device our...