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

Unlocking and implementing bindless rendering

In the previous chapter, we had to manually bind the textures for each material. This also meant that if we wanted to support different types of materials requiring a different number of textures, we would have needed separate shaders and pipelines.

Vulkan provides a mechanism to bind an array of textures that can be used across multiple shaders. Each texture can then be accessed through an index. In the following sections, we are going to highlight the changes we have made to the GPU device implementation to enable this feature and describe how to use it.

In the following sections, we will first check that the extensions required to enable bindless resources are available on a given GPU. Then we will show the changes required to the descriptor pool creation and descriptor set update to make use of bindless resources. The last step will be to update our shaders to use indices in our texture array for rendering.

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