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

The technique we have implemented in this chapter is detailed in Chapter 13, Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing, of the book Ray Tracing Gems. It is freely available here: http://www.realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems/rtg/index.html.

We have only used a limited set of the GLSL APIs available for ray tracing. We recommend reading the GLSL extension specification to see all the options available:

We used a few filters in this chapter. Signal processing is a vast and wonderful field that has more implications in graphics programming than people realize. To get you started, we recommend this article by Bart Wronski: https://bartwronski.com/2021/02/15/bilinear-down-upsampling-pixel-grids-and-that-half-pixel-offset/.