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

A brief history of clustered lighting

In this section, we are going to explore the background of how clustered lighting came to be and how it has evolved over the years.

In real-time applications, until the early 2000s, the most common way to handle lighting was by using the so-called forward rendering, a technique that renders each object on the screen with all the information needed, including light information. The problem with this approach is that it would limit the number of lights that could be processed to a low number, such as 4 or 8, a number that in the early 2000s would be enough.

The concept of Deferred Rendering, and more specifically, shading the same pixel only once, was already pioneered by Michael Deering and colleagues in a seminal paper called The triangle processor and normal vector shader: a VLSI system for high performance graphics in 1988, even though the term deferred was still not used.

Another key concept, the G-buffer, or geometric buffer, was pioneered...