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

Implementing a Frame Graph

In this chapter, we are introducing frame graphs, a new system to control the rendering steps for a given frame. As the name implies, we are going to organize the steps (passes) required to render a frame in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This will allow us to determine the order of execution of each pass and which passes can be executed in parallel.

Having a graph also provides us with many other benefits, such as the following:

  • It allows us to automate the creation and management of render passes and frame buffers, as each pass defines the input resources it will read from and which resources it will write to.
  • It helps us reduce the memory required for a frame with a technique called memory aliasing. We can determine how long a resource will be in use by analyzing the graph. After the resource is no longer needed, we can reuse its memory for a new resource.
  • Finally, we’ll be able to let the graph manage the insertion of memory...