Chapter X: going further

This is a lazy chapter whose only aim is to provide some pointers.

A. Raytracing

B. Tesselation

tesselation this resource

C. Geometry shaders

D. Indirect rendering and GPU-side culling

E. Voxel engines

F. Device groups

VK_KHR_device_group

Move to appropriate section

• Virtual textures: Not all textures are actually backed by physical memory. Only loaded when actually required. Indirection required for mapping virtual resources to their location in physical memory.
• Sparse textures: Textures can be bound non-contiguously to memory. For instance, we could divide textures (including mipmaps) into tiles and update a single tile at a time. Indirection required for (handled in hardware)
• Sparse virtual textures (aka megatextures) mixes the two above ideas. We split our textures (including mipmaps) into tiles (whose size match that of a page of physical memory; this is the sparse part), and we load such tiles in physical memory only when they are actually required (this is the virtual part). János Turánszki has a cool video showcasing what the result looks like in practice.

Texture arrays instead of textures: (see this stackoverflow answer)

When not to use virtual texturing? Actual performance? discussion

Vertex pulling (push vertex, generate data around it)

GPU-driven rendering, device generated commands

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