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 implemented a frame graph to improve the management of rendering passes and make it easier to expand our rendering pipeline in future chapters. We started by covering the basic concepts, nodes and edges, that define a graph.

Next, we gave an overview of the structure of our graph and how it’s encoded in JSON format. We also mentioned why we went for this approach as opposed to defining the graph fully in code.

In the last part, we detailed how the graph is processed and made ready for execution. We gave an overview of the main data structures used for the graph, and covered how the graph is parsed to create nodes and resources, and how edges are computed. Next, we explained the topological sorting of nodes, which ensures they are executed in the correct order. We followed that with the memory allocation strategy, which allows us to reuse memory from resources that are no longer needed at given nodes. Finally, we provided an overview of the rendering...