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

Automating pipeline layout generation

In this section, we are going to take advantage of the data provided by the SPIR-V binary format to extract the information needed to create a pipeline layout. SPIR-V is the intermediate representation (IR) that shader sources are compiled to before being passed to the GPU.

Compared to standard GLSL shader sources, which are plain text, SPIR-V is a binary format. This means it’s a more compact format to use when distributing an application. More importantly, developers don’t have to worry about their shaders getting compiled into a different set of high-level instructions depending on the GPU and driver their code is running on.

However, a SPIR-V binary does not contain the final instructions that will be executed by the GPU. Every GPU will take a SPIR-V blob and do a final compilation into GPU instructions. This step is still required because different GPUs and driver versions can produce different assemblies for the same SPIR...