Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

12

Getting Started with Ray Tracing

In this chapter, we are introducing ray tracing into our rendering pipeline. Thanks to the addition of hardware support for ray tracing in modern GPUs, it’s now possible to integrate ray tracing techniques into real-time rendering.

Ray tracing requires a different setup compared to the traditional rendering pipeline, which is why we are dedicating a whole chapter to setting up a ray tracing pipeline. We are going to cover in detail how to set up a shader binding table to tell the API which shaders to invoke when an intersection test for a given ray succeeds or fails.

Next, we are going to explain how to create the Bottom Level Acceleration Structure (BLAS) and Top Level Acceleration Structure (TLAS). These ...