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

Further reading

Task-based systems have been in use for many years. https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012321/Task-based-Multithreading-How-to provides a good overview.

Many articles can be found that cover work-stealing queues at https://blog.molecular-matters.com/2015/09/08/job-system-2-0-lock-free-work-stealing-part-2-a-specialized-allocator/ and are a good starting point on the subject.

The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 use the Cell processor from IBM to provide more performance to developers through multiple cores. In particular, the PlayStation 3 has several synergistic processor units (SPUs) that developers can use to offload work from the main processor.

There are many presentations and articles that detail many clever ways developers have used these processors, for example, https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1331/The-PlayStation-3-s-SPU and https://gdcvault.com/play/1014356/Practical-Occlusion-Culling-on.