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 introduced the concept of meshlets, a construct that helps us break down large meshes into more manageable chunks and that can be used to perform occlusion computations on the GPU. We have demonstrated how to use the library of our choice (MeshOptimizer) to generate meshlets, and we also illustrated the extra data structures (cones and bounding spheres) that are useful for occlusion operations.

We introduced mesh and task shaders. Conceptually similar to compute shaders, they allow us to quickly process meshlets on the GPU. We demonstrated how to use task shaders to perform back-face and frustum culling, and how mesh shaders replace vertex shaders by processing and generating multiple primitives in parallel.

Finally, we went through the implementation of occlusion culling. We first listed the steps that compose this technique. Next, we demonstrated how to compute a depth pyramid from our existing depth buffer. Lastly, we analyzed the occlusion...