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

Recording commands on multiple threads

To record commands using multiple threads, it is necessary to use different command buffers, at least one on each thread, to record the commands and then submit them to the main queue. To be more precise, in Vulkan, any kind of pool needs to be externally synchronized by the user; thus, the best option is to have an association between a thread and a pool.

In the case of command buffers, they are allocated from the associated pool and commands registered in it. Pools can be CommandPools, DescriptorSetPools, and QueryPools (for time and occlusion queries), and once associated with a thread, they can be used freely inside that thread of execution.

The execution order of the command buffers is based on the order of the array submitted to the main queue – thus, from a Vulkan perspective, sorting can be performed on a command buffer level.

We will see how important the allocation strategy for command buffers is and how easy it is to...