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

Unlocking Async Compute

In this chapter, we are going to improve our renderer by allowing compute work to be done in parallel with graphics tasks. So far, we have been recording and submitting all of our work to a single queue. We can still submit compute tasks to this queue to be executed alongside graphics work: in this chapter, for instance, we have started using a compute shader for the fullscreen lighting rendering pass. We don’t need a separate queue in this case as we want to reduce the amount of synchronization between separate queues.

However, it might be beneficial to run other compute workloads on a separate queue and allow the GPU to fully utilize its compute units. In this chapter, we are going to implement a simple cloth simulation using compute shaders that will run on a separate compute queue. To unlock this new functionality, we will need to make some changes to our engine.

In this chapter, we’re going to cover the following main topics:

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