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

Develop a modern rendering engine from first principles to state-of-the-art techniques

Marco Castorina

Gabriel Sassone

BIRMINGHAMMUMBAI

Copyright 2023 Packt Publishing

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To my parents and my grandma, who taught me to work hard and never give up. To my kids, who remind me daily to look at things differently and always challenge my assumptions. And to my wife without her support throughout the years, this book wouldnt exist.

Marco Castorina

To my mum, dad, and sister who always believed in me and taught me how to strive to be better with an open mind and heart.

To my friend Enrico, for always being an inspiration in all the adventures of my life.

To Gianluca, Piero, Mauro, Roberto, Stefano, Riccardo, Emiliano, Stuart, Federico, Luca, and Stefano for being in my life and supporting me over the years.

To the Belluno crew, colleagues, and friends: Carlo Mangani, Fabio Pagetti, Mattia Poderi, Vittorio Conti, Flavio Bortot, and Luca Marchetti.

To all the Blacksand crew: Marco, Alessandro, Andrea, Gianluca, Alessandra, Elisa, Cinzia, and many more, who made me feel at home even when I was on the other side of the planet.

To all the colleagues that helped me on my journey: Tiziano Lena, Gabriele Barlocci, Alessandro Monopoli, Daniele Pieroni, Francesco Antolini, Andrea Pessino, Simone Kulczycki, Marco Vallario, Nicholas Rathbone, Peter Asberg, Dave Barrett, David Grijns, Christofer Sundberg, David Smethurst, Engin Cilasun, and Gennadiy Korol you all taught me a lot.

To the awesome rendering community: Matt Pettineo, Natalya Tatarchuk, Inigo Quilez, Jorge Jimenez, Bart Wronski, Alan Wolfe, and many, many more.

And finally to everybody else that crossed my path: in one way or another, you changed my life.

Gabriel Sassone

Like all published works, this book is the effort of many dedicated people. To Chayan Majumdar and Nitin Nainani, who first reached out to us about this project and helped us structure the book. To our editors Abhishek Jadhav and Aamir Ahmed, who helped us find our voice and made sure our content was clear and organized.

To our project managers, Ajesh Devavaram and Aishwarya Mohan, who kept us on track and were understanding when we needed more time. We would also like to thank our technical reviewer, who gave us invaluable feedback to make each chapter clearer and more accessible.

This book wouldnt exist if it werent for the many dedicated graphics and rendering engineers all over the world who keep sharing their work and pushing the field forward. Many of those ideas have made it into this book and we hope we did them justice. The support of the graphics community has been invaluable and kept us motivated throughout the writing process.

I, Marco, would also like to thank AMD and 7th Sense, who have allowed me to work on this project in my spare time. Andy Poole at Samsung first helped me wade through the Vulkan specification. His insight and approach still help me on a daily basis. To Hugh McAtamney and Bryan Duggan from the Dublin Institute of Technology, who inspired me to pursue a career in graphics.

To Eike Anderson from Bournemouth University, who helped me to improve my technical writing and approach things from first principles. To Richard Brown and Alex Hughes at 7th Sense, as my discussions with them challenged me to push Vulkan to its limits and provided insight into improving my code architecture.

Finally, I couldnt have done it without Gabriel. His tremendous experience and continuous feedback supported me throughout this project. It was a joy working with him and I consider myself lucky that I can now call him a friend.

I, Gabriel, would like to thank The Multiplayer Group, who have allowed me to work on this project and were supportive of it.

To Matt Pettineo at ReadyAtDawn, for being my biggest inspiration in rendering and coding. Without his guidance and teachings, I would not have been able to tackle this project.

To Engin Cilasun, for being my rendering and engine design pal, teaching me a lot about how to think differently and challenging my assumptions to find new ways.

To Codemasters, ReadyAtDawn, Moon Studios, and Avalanche Studios for all the experience and teaching in my career.

Finally, to Marco, who gave me the possibility to work on this project. His deep knowledge and understanding of rendering and GPUs were paramount. His skill at solving complex problems and reading the Vulkan spec gave us the edge on the latest technology. I learned a lot from him and have deep gratitude toward him.

It was incredible working with him, and even better, having a new person to call a friend.

Marco Castorina first became familiar with Vulkan while working as a driver developer at Samsung. Later, he developed a 2D and 3D renderer in Vulkan from scratch for a leading media server company. He recently joined the games graphics performance team at AMD. In his spare time, he keeps up to date with the latest techniques in real-time graphics. He also likes cooking and playing guitar.

Gabriel Sassone is a rendering enthusiast currently working as a principal rendering engineer at The Multiplayer Group. Previously working for Avalanche Studios, where he first encountered Vulkan, they developed the Vulkan layer for the proprietary Apex Engine and its Google Stadia port. He previously worked at ReadyAtDawn, Codemasters, FrameStudios, and some other non-gaming tech companies. His spare time is filled with music and rendering, gaming, and outdoor activities.