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Niagara

This is a Vulkan renderer that is written on stream from scratch - without using any third party code that is Vulkan specific. We are using non-Vulkan-specific third party libraries however.

The goal is to experiment with a few modern Vulkan rendering techniques, such as GPU culling & scene submission, cone culling, automatic occlusion culling, task/mesh shading, and whatever else it is that we will want to experiment with. The code will be written on stream.

Requirements

The renderer was originally written using Visual Studio and targeted Windows desktops with modern Vulkan drivers. Since then the development platform has switched to Linux, but you can still build and run it on Windows - via CMake.

Building

To build and run the project, clone this repository using --recursive flag:

git clone https://github.com/zeux/niagara.git --recursive

Make sure you have Vulkan SDK installed; open the folder niagara in Visual Studio (as a CMake project) and build it. On Linux, you can use CMake with your build generator of choice.

To run the program, command line should contain arguments with paths to .obj files or a .gltf scene; you can use kitten.obj from data/ folder for testing.

To use Amazon Lumberyard Bistro scene, clone https://github.com/zeux/niagara_bistro and specify path to bistro.gltf instead.

Stream

The development of this project is streamed on YouTube, on Saturdays at 11 AM PST with a somewhat irregular schedule.

Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0JVLUVCkk-l7CWCn3-cdftR0oajugYvd

  1. Setting up instance/device and filling the screen with a solid color: https://youtu.be/BR2my8OE1Sc
  2. Rendering a triangle on screen: https://youtu.be/5eS3gsL_P-c
  3. Cleaning up validation errors and implementing swapchain resize: https://youtu.be/_VU-G5rglnA
  4. Rendering a mesh using shader storage buffers and int8: https://youtu.be/nKCzD5iK71M
  5. Rendering a mesh using NVidia RTX mesh shading pipeline: https://youtu.be/gbeOKMjmQ-g
  6. Optimizing GPU time by using device-local memory and parallelizing mesh shader: https://youtu.be/ayKoqK3kQ9c
  7. Using descriptor update templates and parsing SPIRV to extract reflection data: https://youtu.be/3Py4GlWAicY
  8. Cluster cone culling using task shaders and subgroup ops: https://youtu.be/KckRq7Rm3Mw
  9. Tuning mesh shading pipeline for performance: https://youtu.be/snZkA4D_qjU
  10. Depth buffer, perspective projection, 3D transforms and multi draw indirect: https://youtu.be/y4WOsAaXLh0
  11. Multiple meshes and GPU frustum culling: https://youtu.be/NGGzk4Fi2iU
  12. Draw call compaction using KHR_draw_indirect_count and LOD support: https://youtu.be/IYRgDcnJJ2I
  13. Depth pyramid construction and extending SPIRV reflection parser: https://youtu.be/YCteLdYdZWQ
  14. Automatic occlusion culling: https://youtu.be/Fj1E1A4CPCM
  15. Vulkan 1.2 and GPU buffer pointers: https://youtu.be/78tVIA6nRQg
  16. Upgrading to Vulkan 1.3: https://youtu.be/Ka30T6BMdhI
  17. Implementing triangle culling: https://youtu.be/JKTfAgv3Vlo
  18. Meshlet occlusion culling: https://youtu.be/5sBpo5wKmEM
  19. Optimizing culling: https://youtu.be/1Tj6bZvZMts
  20. Task command submission: https://youtu.be/eYvGruGHhUE
  21. Cluster compute culling: https://youtu.be/zROUBE5pLuI
  22. Loading glTF scenes: https://youtu.be/9OF6k57orXo
  23. Bindless textures: https://youtu.be/n9nqSEyXMeA
  24. Tracing rays: https://youtu.be/N1OVfBEcyb8
  25. Tracing rays faster: https://youtu.be/U7TGQsjT16E
  26. Materials and shadows: https://youtu.be/iZTUjRntMbM
  27. Transparent shadows: https://youtu.be/233jxF7irmE
  28. Moving objects: https://youtu.be/TcuUz1ib35c

Issues

During the streams we find various bugs in parts of the Vulkan stack and report them; bugs marked with ✔️ have been fixed.