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

Improving banding

Banding is a problem affecting various steps in the rendering of a frame. It affects Volumetric Fog and lighting calculations, for example.

Figure 11.5 – Banding problem detail in Volumetric Fog

Figure 11.5 – Banding problem detail in Volumetric Fog

We can see in Figure 11.5 how this can be present in Volumetric Fog if no solution is implemented. A solution to remove banding in visuals is to add some dithering to various passes of the frame, but that also adds visual noise to the image.

Dithering is defined as the intentional addition of noise specifically to remove banding. Different type of noises can be used, as we will see in the accompaining code. Adding temporal reprojection smoothens the noise added, thus becoming one of the best ways to improve the visual quality of the image.

In Chapter 10, Adding Volumetric Fog, we saw a very simple temporal reprojection scheme, and we have also added noise to various steps of the algorithm. We have now seen a more complex implementation...