Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

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
Introducing the Raptor Engine and Hydra
Improving Resources Management
Unlocking Multi-Threading
Implementing a Frame Graph
Unlocking Async Compute
GPU-Driven Rendering
Rendering Many Lights with Clustered Deferred Rendering
Adding Shadows Using Mesh Shaders
Implementing Variable Rate Shading
Adding Volumetric Fog
Temporal Anti-Aliasing
Getting Started with Ray Tracing
Revisiting Shadows with Ray Tracing
Adding Dynamic Diffuse Global Illumination with Ray Tracing
Adding Reflections with Ray Tracing