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

Rendering Many Lights with Clustered Deferred Rendering

Until now, our scene has been lit by a single point light. While this has worked fine so far as we focused our attention more on laying the foundations of our rendering engine, it’s not a very compelling and realistic use case. Modern games can have hundreds of lights in a given scene, and it’s important that the lighting stage is performed efficiently and within the budget of a frame.

In this chapter, we will first describe the most common techniques that are used both in deferred and forward shading. We will highlight the pros and cons of each technique so that you can determine which one best fits your needs.

Next, we are going to provide an overview of our G-buffer setup. While the G-buffer has been in place from the very beginning, we haven’t covered its implementation in detail. This is a good time to go into more detail, as the choice of a deferred renderer will inform our strategy for clustered...