Porting AnKi to Vulkan part 2

In my Porting AnKi to Vulkan post I went into detail describing how AnKi’s interfaces changed to accommodate the Vulkan backend and how this backend looked like. Eight months have passed since then and a few things changed mainly towards greater flexibility. This post describes what are the differences with the older interfaces, how is the performance currently and what new extensions AnKi is using now.

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The journey of porting AnKi to Vulkan

Someone once said “make it work, make it fast, make it pretty” and I’m happy (and at the same time relieved) to say that the effort of porting AnKi to Vulkan just hit the first major milestone! It’s working! I think this is a good time to share a few thoughts on how this milestone was achieved, the pains and generally the overall experience. Disclaimer: Whatever you read in the following lines reflects my own views and not those of my current employer.

So let’s start from the beginning. Continue reading “The journey of porting AnKi to Vulkan”

Vulkan: The next Khronos graphics API… that is not OpenGL

This year’s GDC proved to be quite exciting. New technologies, new ideas and some heavyweight announcements. According to the press one of the most exciting presentations was Khronos’ Vulkan API and the demos running on top of it. That really depicted the momentum, the support and the commitment behind the new API.

This article gathers all the publicly shared information behind the new API and adds some personal thoughts in the mix. The fact that I had the pleasure to follow the development of Vulkan API very closely (I was involved early on in the development of a prototype Vulkan driver for ARM’s GPUs) will give some credibility to my personal views. But that doesn’t mean that my views reflect those of my employer. So, whatever you read in the following lines doesn’t necessary reflect the views of my current employer.

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Designing a new texture format

In this article we will be discussing the whys and whats of the new AnKi texture format. First we will try to shade some light on the current texture formats and what are their limitations and later we will present the ankitex format in detail and how it solves these limitations.

The first thing we need do is to shed some light on OpenGL hardware, OpenGL drivers and how they need their textures served.

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Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

“Ambient occlusion is a shading method used in 3D computer graphics which helps add realism to local reflection models by taking into account attenuation of light due to occlusion” [Wikipedia.org]

The proper way to do ambient occlusion is very expensive for today’s hardware and especially without the use of a ray-tracing renderer. For that reason a few new techniques developed that tried to produce the same result using simpler and faster algorithms. One of these approaches is the Screen Space Ambient Occlusion (aka SSAO) that makes the calculations of ambient occlusion in 2D space just like a normal 2D filter. This article will not go deep into what SSAO is, there are many great readings around the web that cover the theory behind SSAO, in this article we will jump into the implementation that AnKi uses.

There are quite a few techniques to produce SSAO, a top level way to group them is from the resources they need to produce the SSAO:

  • Some use just the depth buffer (Amnesia, Aliens VS Predator)
  • others use the depth buffer and the normal buffer (Crysis, gamerendering article)
  • and others use the pixel position and the normal buffer (gamedev article)

AnKi used to implement the second technique for quite some time. The results were good but apparently not that good, so for the past couple of weeks I’ve tried to implement the third technique by reading this great article from gamedev. The present article extends the gamedev one by adding a few optimization tips and by presenting the code in GLSL.

Bellow you can see the old and the new SSAO, rendered at the half of the original rendering size with two blurring passes.

Old implementation of SSAO
New implementation of SSAO
The whole scene with the new SSAO

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