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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about the concept of task-based parallelism and saw how using a library such as enkiTS can quickly add multi-threading capabilities to the Raptor Engine.

We then learned how to add support for loading data from files to the GPU using an asynchronous loader. We also focused on Vulkan-related code to have a second queue of execution that can run in parallel to the one responsible for drawing. We saw the difference between primary and secondary command buffers.

We talked about the importance of the buffer’s allocation strategy to ensure safety when recording commands in parallel, especially taking into consideration command reuse between frames.

Finally, we showed step by step how to use both types of command buffers, and this should be enough to add the desired level of parallelism to any application that decides to use Vulkan as its graphics API.

In the next chapter, we will work on a data structure called Frame Graph, which will...