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 implemented a light clustering solution. We started by explaining forward and Deferred Rendering techniques and their main advantages and shortcomings. Next, we described two approaches to group lights to reduce the computation needed to shade a single fragment.

We then outlined our G-buffer implementation by listing the render targets that we use. We detailed our use of the VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension, which allows us to simplify the render pass and framebuffer use. We also highlighted the relevant code in the G-buffer shader to write to multiple render targets, and we provided the implementation for our normal encoding and decoding. In closing, we suggested some optimizations to further reduce the memory used by our G-buffer implementation.

In the last section, we described the algorithm we selected to implement light clustering. We started by sorting the lights by their depth value into depth bins. We then proceeded to store the lights...