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

Understanding task and mesh shaders

Before we begin, we should mention that mesh shaders can be used without task shaders. If, for instance, you wanted to perform culling or some other pre-processing step on the meshlets on the CPU, you are free to do so.

Also, note that task and mesh shaders replace vertex shaders in the graphics pipeline. The output of mesh shaders is going to be consumed by the fragment shader directly.

The following diagram illustrates the differences between the traditional geometry pipeline and the mesh shader pipeline:

Figure 6.4 – The difference between traditional and mesh pipeline

Figure 6.4 – The difference between traditional and mesh pipeline

In this section, we are going to provide an overview of how task and mesh shaders work and then use this information to implement back-face and frustum culling using task shaders.

Both task and mesh shaders use the same execution model of compute shaders, with some minor changes. The output of task shaders is consumed directly by a mesh...