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 culling using compute

In the previous section, we demonstrated how to perform back-face and frustum culling on meshlets. In this section, we are going to implement frustum and occlusion culling using compute shaders.

Depending on the rendering pipeline, occlusion culling is usually done through a depth pre-pass, where we write only the depth buffer. The depth buffer can then be used during the G-Buffer pass to avoid shading fragments that we already know are occluded.

The downside of this approach is that we have to draw the scene twice and, unless there is other work that can overlap with the depth pre-pass, have to wait for the depth pre-pass to complete before proceeding to the next step.

The algorithm described in this section was first presented at https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/aaltonenhaar_siggraph2015_combined_final_footer_220dpi.pdf.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Using the depth buffer from the previous frame, we render the visible objects...