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 Resources Management

In this chapter, we are going to improve resource management to make it easier to deal with materials that might have a varying number of textures. This technique is usually referred to as bindless, even though it’s not entirely accurate. We are still going to bind a list of resources; however, we can access them by using an index rather than having to specify exactly which resources are going to be used during a particular draw.

The second improvement we are going to make is automating the generation of pipeline layouts. Large projects have hundreds or thousands of shaders, compiled with many different variations depending on the combinations of materials used by a particular application. If developers had to manually update their pipeline layout definitions every time a change is made, very few applications would make it to market. The implementation presented in this chapter relies on the information provided by the SPIR-V binary format.

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