Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

By : Sergey Kosarevsky, Viktor Latypov
3 (1)
Book Image

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

3 (1)
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)

Doing frustum culling on the GPU with compute shaders

In the previous recipe, we learned how to cull invisible meshes on the CPU in a classic and somewhat old-fashioned way. As GPUs grew more and more performant, this CPU-based approach became very inefficient. Let's learn how to utilize compute shaders to implement a frustum culling pipeline on a GPU using OpenGL.

The goal of this recipe is to teach you what you can do on modern GPUs with compute pipelines rather than implementing a very performant culling system. Once we are comfortable with the basics, we will discuss the limitations, as well as further directions for improvements.

Getting ready

Make sure you have read the previous recipe, Doing frustum culling on the CPU, so that you're familiar with the frustum culling basics.

The source code for this recipe can be found at Chapter10/GL02_CullingGPU.

How to do it…

Let's take a look at how we can port the C++ culling code from the previous...