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 have built the foundations to support compute shaders in our renderer. We started by introducing timeline semaphores and how they can be used to replace multiple semaphores and fences. We have shown how to wait for a timeline semaphore on the CPU and how a timeline semaphore can be used as part of a queue submission, either for it to be signaled or to be waited on.

Next, we demonstrated how to use the newly introduced timeline semaphore to synchronize execution across the graphics and compute queue.

In the last section, we showed an example of how to approach porting code written for the CPU to the GPU. We first explained some of the benefits of running computations on the GPU. Next, we gave an overview of the execution model for compute shaders and the configuration of local and global workgroup sizes. Finally, we gave a concrete example of a compute shader for cloth simulation and highlighted the main differences with the same code written for the...