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

Further reading

We only gave a brief overview of the Vulkan APIs for variable rate shading. We recommend reading the specification for further details: https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/1.3-extensions/html/vkspec.html#primsrast-fragment-shading-rate.

Most of the resources available online seem to be focused on the DirectX API, but the same approach can be translated to Vulkan. This blog post provides some details on the benefits of VRS: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/variable-rate-shading-a-scalpel-in-a-world-of-sledgehammers/.

These two videos provide in-depth details on integrating VRS into existing game engines. The section on how to implement VRS using compute shader is particularly interesting:

This article illustrates how VRS can also have other use cases, for instance, to accelerate raytracing: https://interplayoflight.wordpress.com/2022/05/29/accelerating...