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

GPU-Driven Rendering

In this chapter, we will upgrade the geometry pipeline to use the latest available technology: mesh shaders and meshlets. The idea behind this technique is to move the flow of mesh rendering from the CPU to the GPU, moving culling and draw command generation into different shaders.

We will first work on the mesh structure on the CPU, by separating it into different meshlets that are groups of up to 64 triangles, each with an individual bounding sphere. We will then use compute shaders to perform culling and write a list of commands to draw the meshlets in the different passes. Finally, we will use the mesh shaders to render the meshlets. There will also be a compute version provided, as mesh shaders are still available only on Nvidia GPUs for now.

Traditionally, geometry culling has been performed on the CPU. Each mesh on the scene is usually represented by an axis aligned bounding box (AABB). An AABB can easily be culled against the camera frustum, but...