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

Getting Started with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are introducing ray tracing into our rendering pipeline. Thanks to the addition of hardware support for ray tracing in modern GPUs, it’s now possible to integrate ray tracing techniques into real-time rendering.

Ray tracing requires a different setup compared to the traditional rendering pipeline, which is why we are dedicating a whole chapter to setting up a ray tracing pipeline. We are going to cover in detail how to set up a shader binding table to tell the API which shaders to invoke when an intersection test for a given ray succeeds or fails.

Next, we are going to explain how to create the Bottom Level Acceleration Structure (BLAS) and Top Level Acceleration Structure (TLAS). These Acceleration Structures (AS) are needed to speed up scene ray traversal and ensure that ray tracing can be performed at an interactive rate.

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

  • Introduction to ray...