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

Breaking down large meshes into meshlets

In this chapter, we are going to focus primarily on the geometry stage of the pipeline, the one before the shading stage. Adding some complexity to the geometry stage of the pipeline will pay dividends in later stages as we’ll reduce the number of pixels that need to be shaded.

Note

When we refer to the geometry stage of the graphics pipeline, we don’t mean geometry shaders. The geometry stage of the pipeline refers to input assembly (IA), vertex processing, and primitive assembly (PA). Vertex processing can, in turn, run one or more of the following shaders: vertex, geometry, tessellation, task, and mesh shaders.

Content geometry comes in many shapes, sizes, and complexity. A rendering engine must be able to deal with meshes from small, detailed objects to large terrains. Large meshes (think terrain or buildings) are usually broken down by artists so that the rendering engine can pick out the different levels of details...