[HN Gopher] Ray Tracer Sandbox in Vulkan
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Ray Tracer Sandbox in Vulkan
Author : wyldfire
Score : 68 points
Date : 2020-11-06 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| slx26 wrote:
| there are two gifs that are very nice, but extremely heavy,
| almost 80MB together. you might not want to load that on mobile
| data
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Why would they use GIF instead of HTML5 video? Could have
| significantly reduced file size.
| speedgoose wrote:
| You can't embed videos in Github's markdown.
| gallerdude wrote:
| Off-topic, is there any mid-level 3D API that I can plug vertices
| into directly? Everything that I see is either super-low level
| (Vulcan, OpenGL) or super-high level (Unity).
| sxp wrote:
| For quick 3D visualization, I've used three.js and a minimal
| HTML page. It has loaders for many common 3D file formats so
| you start with one of the samples at
| https://threejs.org/examples/ and hack around until it loads
| the data that you want.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I'm in kind of the same boat. I grew very disatisfied with
| Unity earlier this year and began looking for alternatives. I
| explored writing my own rendering engine, given that my
| requirements aren't very high.
|
| Back in January, I discovered this really cool .NET Standard
| 2.0 library for abstracting Direct3D 11, Vulkan, Metal, OpenGL
| 3, and OpenGL ES 3 called Veldrid:
| https://github.com/mellinoe/veldrid
|
| The documentation is pretty good, for its own parts, and it has
| a fair number of examples for setting up things like different
| windowing libraries. I was able to put together a set of code
| for a single demo running in Windows Forms, WPF, and Xamarin
| Forms fairly easily. It also has support for SDL2.
|
| Currently, I'm going through a Codevember exercise where I
| teach myself WebGL from scratch.
|
| From what I've learned so far, most of the graphics APIs these
| days work in very similar ways. And Veldrid polishes over the
| few differences (esp. in the case of OpenGL). WebGL does, too,
| in that they present an OpenGL front-end, but the back-end can
| be implemented in different graphics APIs (for example, on
| Windows it's actually implemented in D3D 11 through ANGLE).
|
| In general, you need to create a Shader Program--which is a
| combination of multipe Shaders of different types, e.g. Vertex,
| Compute, and Fragment--construct one or more Buffers to which
| you will load data (generally in a big, ol' smash of data), and
| configure how ranges within those Buffers will map to pointer
| locations within your Shader Program.
|
| However, I've generally found that there is little
| documentation _anywhere_ on how to architect a data pipeline to
| use all of the various GPU resources efficiently. Everyone
| talks about "use as few draw calls as possible". But they
| don't really tell you how to achieve that.
|
| My feeling is that a Shader Program is loosely analogous to a
| Material in something like Three.js or Unity. I'm guessing that
| the ideal approach is to take all of the Meshes in Three.js, or
| all of the Renderers in Unity, that have all of the same
| Materials, and then combining their Geometries into a single
| block of memory. And that's where Uber Shaders come in, as an
| attempt to also combine all of the different ways in which
| you'd want to render different Materials into a single Shader
| Program.
| jlarocco wrote:
| I'm actually working on a library like that for Common Lisp,
| but it's still very much a work in progress.
|
| My goal is to have a framework where I can experiment with
| different parts of OpenGL by sub-classing something and then
| override a method or two, and have it "just work" with
| everything else in the framework (shaders, viewers, animation,
| user interaction, etc.)
|
| https://github.com/jl2/newgl/tree/buffer-refactor
| jleahy wrote:
| Like it or not, the answer is probably OpenGL. If you go with
| version 3.3 (a good choice in my opinion) and then it's really
| only a few function calls and you're submitting vertices, and
| it's going to be supported on any platform. Use glfw and you
| don't need to worry about platform stuff (creating windows is a
| pain otherwise).
|
| Counting the lines of a renderer I have lying around it's 300
| lines (including much whitespace). That's very full functioned,
| it correctly positions the window in the center of the monitor,
| handles errors properly, takes mouse and keyboard input, sets
| up the view/projection matrices, uses shaders, etc.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| Agreed. And despite being "deprecated", the "fixed-function"
| OpenGL 1.x API is still implemented on all major platforms
| (for now?), and it's even more high-level (although your
| graphics may look somewhat dated). Plus you can mix/match API
| levels (I think), so you can start with 1.x and move some
| things to 3.x/4.x style OpenGL when you need shaders. I wish
| Vulkan wasn't a huge steep learning cliff in comparison.
| jleahy wrote:
| It'll be there forever (compatibility), but the problem is
| there's not a lot of overlap between 1.x and 3.x/4.x. I
| think people are better sticking to the 3.x core profile.
| Shaders just aren't that hard and fixed function is a
| really outdated way of thinking.
|
| Generally I'd also say stick with 3.x (rather than 4.x)
| unless you need tesselation shaders.
| moron4hire wrote:
| I believe with the latest versions of the APIs, the fixed
| function pipeline stuff is now emulated in the
| programmable pipeline, but the two don't mesh well, so
| you end up with particularly bad performance. I've had to
| find and install the old DX9 runtime to get some older
| games to run at reasonable frame rate.
| jleahy wrote:
| And just for you, I pulled some very ancient code of mine
| (2012) and stripped it down enough so that it renders a
| single triangle (and you can move around), nothing more.
|
| https://github.com/jleahy/gldemo
|
| That's a full OpenGL setup, with all the fiddly bits taken
| care of. Obviously it's a bit over the top (you don't need
| vertex buffer region management for one triangle), you don't
| need SIMD matmul, but that's the maximum.
|
| You could port that to any language with OpenGL bindings.
| typedef_struct wrote:
| https://github.com/google/filament and ThreeJS are probably the
| closest
| fulafel wrote:
| You may be looking for a 3D rendering engine. There are lots of
| choices depending on your target platform, preferred
| programming language, license preferences, requirements for
| real time vs animation or image production, etc.
| jlarocco wrote:
| Perfect timing! I just got a new machine with a Quadro RTX4000
| card, and I've been looking for example code to see what it can
| do.
|
| It still blows my mind that Mandelbrot fractals (and now ray
| tracing) that would take 10s of minutes to render at 640x480 on
| my first computer, now render at 60fps on a 4k display with real-
| time panning/zooming.
| waiseristy wrote:
| I had no idea someone wrote a Vulkan backend for ImGUI. Very
| useful!
|
| https://github.com/Zielon/PBRVulkan/blob/master/PBRVulkan/Ra...
| Impossible wrote:
| ImGUI has backends for every graphics API in regular use, and
| some that might be considered deprecated (DX9). Including game
| engine abstraction layers in Unreal and Unity and console
| properietrary APIs (not public, of course). Here's a full list
| of public graphics APIs and windowing systems part of the
| official release
| (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/tree/master/backends). Maybe
| with the exception of stb_image, it's only of the most
| integrated open source libraries in games and graphics
| shmerl wrote:
| The only outliers who didn't adopt Vulkan today are MS, Sony and
| Apple. MS and Apple have very lock-in minded people among those
| who decide this.
|
| Not sure what stops Sony from doing it.
|
| Things went better with OpenXR.
| Arelius wrote:
| So who does that leave? Linux, Android and Stadia? And maybe
| Nintendo? There is about as much not supporting it as are.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Among several embedded OEMs and the whole CAD/CAM and
| scientific industry focused on OpenGL/DirectX, without any
| patience to deal with low level idiosyncratic of Vulkan and its
| increasing amount of extensions every month, which is why
| Khronos decided to try to advocate Vulkan to them via ANARI.
|
| Let see if it as successful as OpenCL 2.x that had to reboot
| back into OpenCL 1.2 for version 3.0.
|
| OpenXR doesn't define the 3D APIs, it is just device
| management, one can use it with whatever APIs one feels like
| it.
|
| And then there is Hollywood switching to CUDA based render
| farms, like OTOY, because Vulkan Compute doesn't deliver what
| they need.
| m-p-3 wrote:
| .
| bazooka_penguin wrote:
| They already had a low level graphics API for ps4, GNM,
| before Mantle. In fact, EA DICE's Johan Anderson who did most
| of the groundwork for mantle, said he got his ideas from
| working with console APIs. At the time he was working on the
| mantle spec it probably would have been the xbox 360 or ps3
| APIs or an early form of the ps4 API. The X1 didn't launch
| with a low level API, but they provided one some time before
| 2014 according to a Metro Redux dev
| shmerl wrote:
| AMD also makes chips for Xbox, so that isn't really a reason
| for them. I haven't seen Sony saying they want Vulkan to
| succeed. Like MS with DX12 and Apple with Metal, they are so
| far stuck with their GNM.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Sony already has several low-level APIs, much easier to use
| than Vulkan and precede it.
| bch wrote:
| Are you talking about gnm, gnmx[0] ?
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yep.
|
| It is kind of DirectX 12 like, with a shading language
| similar to HLSL.
|
| Also Switch is always referred as an example of Vulkan
| support, they also do OpenGL 4.6, but what really matters
| for native titles on the platform is NVN.
| Arelius wrote:
| And I'm not sure that it actually has Vulkan support. Can
| confirm that OpenGL is at least technically supported.
| Arelius wrote:
| Everyone says Nintendo supports Vulkan. But that wasn't
| actually the case outside of marketing materials in the past,
| and nobody has confirmed that this has changed since.
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(page generated 2020-11-06 23:00 UTC)