Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan: Develop a modern rendering engine from first principles to state-of-the-art techniques

Book Synopsis: Develop a rendering framework by implementing next-generation 3D graphics, leveraging advanced Vulkan features, and getting familiar with efficient real-time ray tracing techniques uncovered by leading industry experts

Key Features

• Develop high-performance rendering techniques in Vulkan
• Automate some of the more tedious aspects like pipeline layouts and resource barriers
• Understand how to take advantage of mesh shaders and ray tracing

Book Description

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.

What You Will Learn

• Understand resources management and modern bindless techniques
• Get comfortable with how a frame graph works and know its advantages
• Explore how to render efficiently with many light sources
• Discover how to integrate variable rate shading
• Understand the benefits and limitations of temporal anti-aliasing
• Get to grips with how GPU-driven rendering works
• Explore and leverage ray tracing to improve render quality

Who This Book Is For

This book is for professional graphics and game developers who want to gain in-depth knowledge about how to write a modern and performant rendering engine in Vulkan. Familiarity with basic concepts of graphics programming (i.e. matrices, vectors, etc.) and fundamental knowledge of Vulkan are required.

Table of Contents

1. Introducing the Raptor Engine and Hydra
2. Improving Resources Management
3. Unlocking Multi-Threading
4. Implementing a Frame Graph
5. Unlocking Async Compute
6. GPU-Driven Rendering
7. Rendering Many Lights with Clustered Deferred Rendering
8. Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders
9. Implementing Variable Rate Shading
10. Adding Volumetric Fog
11. Temporal Anti-Aliasing
12. Getting Started with Ray Tracing
13. Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing
14. Adding Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray Tracing
15. Adding Reflections with Ray Tracing

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