Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
4 (2)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

4 (2)
By: Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov

Overview of this book

OpenGL is a popular cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) used for rendering 2D and 3D graphics, while Vulkan is a low-overhead, cross-platform 3D graphics API that targets high-performance applications. 3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook helps you learn about modern graphics rendering algorithms and techniques using C++ programming along with OpenGL and Vulkan APIs. The book begins by setting up a development environment and takes you through the steps involved in building a 3D rendering engine with the help of basic, yet self-contained, recipes. Each recipe will enable you to incrementally add features to your codebase and show you how to integrate different 3D rendering techniques and algorithms into one large project. You'll also get to grips with core techniques such as physically based rendering, image-based rendering, and CPU/GPU geometry culling, to name a few. As you advance, you'll explore common techniques and solutions that will help you to work with large datasets for 2D and 3D rendering. Finally, you'll discover how to apply optimization techniques to build performant and feature-rich graphics applications. By the end of this 3D rendering book, you'll have gained an improved understanding of best practices used in modern graphics APIs and be able to create fast and versatile 3D rendering frameworks.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

OpenGL 4.6 with AZDO and Vulkan

Approaching Zero Driver Overhead (AZDO) is not a single specific OpenGL feature. It is more of a set of techniques, a software development approach with OpenGL, and a way of structuring data access and API usage to make it faster by batching a lot of draw calls together. It was originally presented by Cass Everitt, Tim Foley, John McDonald, and Graham Sellers. Many things possible with Vulkan are also possible with OpenGL/AZDO. However, Vulkan is very different to OpenGL because it can precompile the pipeline state, while in modern OpenGL, a comparable level of performance can be achieved through a completely different set of methods; for example, bindless textures and buffers, programmable vertex pulling, and combining multiple draw calls into a single one.

There is a vendor-specific OpenGL extension, NV_command_list, from NVIDIA, which can compile OpenGL commands into a command list for efficient reuse. We will not be covering it here because it...