| # Granite | |
| Granite is my personal Vulkan renderer project. | |
| ## Why release this? | |
| The most interesting part of this project compared to the other open-source Vulkan renderers so far | |
| is probably the render graph implementation. | |
| The project is on GitHub in the hope it might be useful as-is | |
| for learning purposes or generating implementation ideas. | |
| ### Disclaimer | |
| **Do not expect any support or help. | |
| Pull requests will likely be ignored or dismissed.** | |
| ## License | |
| The code is licensed under MIT. Feel free to use it for whatever purpose. | |
| ## High-level documentation | |
| See `OVERVIEW.md`. | |
| ## Low-level rendering backend | |
| The rendering backend focuses entirely on Vulkan, | |
| so it reuses Vulkan enums and data structures where appropriate. | |
| However, the API greatly simplifies the more painful points of writing straight Vulkan. | |
| It's not designed to be the fastest renderer ever made, it's likely a happy middle ground between | |
| "perfect" Vulkan and OpenGL/D3D11 w.r.t. CPU overhead. | |
| - Memory manager | |
| - Deferred destruction and release of API objects and memory | |
| - Automatic descriptor set management | |
| - Linear allocators for vertex/index/uniform/staging data | |
| - Automatic pipeline creation | |
| - Command buffer tracks state similar to older APIs | |
| - Uses TRANSFER-queue on desktop to upload linear-allocated vertex/index/uniform data in bulk | |
| - Vulkan GLSL for shaders, shaders are compiled in runtime with shaderc | |
| - Pipeline cache save-to-disk and reload | |
| - Warm up internal hashmaps with Fossilize | |
| - Easier-to-use fences and semaphores | |
| Missing bits: | |
| - Multithreaded rendering | |
| - Precompile all shaders to optimized SPIR-V | |
| Implementation is found in `vulkan/`. | |
| ## High-level rendering backend | |
| A basic scene graph, component system and other higher-level scaffolding lives in `renderer/`. | |
| This is probably the most unoptimized and naive part. | |
| ## PBR renderer | |
| Pretty barebones, half-assed PBR renderer. Very simplified IBL support. | |
| Fancy rendering is not the real motivation behind this project. | |
| ## Post-AA | |
| Fairly straight forward FXAA, SMAA and TAA (no true velocity buffer though). | |
| ## Automatic shader recompile and texture reload (Linux/Android only) | |
| Immediately when shaders are modified or textures are changed, the resources are automatically reloaded. | |
| The implementation uses inotify to do this, | |
| so it's exclusive to Linux unless a backend is implemented on Windows (no). | |
| ## Network VFS | |
| For Linux host and Android device, | |
| assets and shaders can be pulled over TCP (via ADB port-forwarding) with `network/netfs_server.cpp`. | |
| Quite convenient. | |
| ## Validation | |
| In debug build, LunarG validation layers are enabled. | |
| Granite is squeaky clean. | |
| ## Render graph | |
| `renderer/render_graph.hpp` and `renderer/render_graph.cpp` contains a fairly complete | |
| render graph. It supports: | |
| - Automatic layout transitions | |
| - Automatic loadOp/storeOp usage | |
| - Automatic scaled loadOp for simple lower-res game -> high-res UI rendering scenarios | |
| - Uses async compute queues automatically | |
| - Optimal barrier placement, signals as early as possible, waits as late as possible | |
| VkEvent is used for in-queue resources, VkSemaphore for cross-queue resources | |
| - Basic render target aliasing | |
| - Can merge two or more passes into multiple subpasses for efficient rendering on tile-based architectures | |
| - Automatic mip-mapping if requested | |
| - Uses transient attachments automatically to save memory on tile-based architectures | |
| - Render target history, read previous frame's results in next frame for feedback | |
| - Conditional render passes, can preserve render passes if necessary | |
| - Render passes are reordered for optimal (?) overlap in execution | |
| - Automatic, optimal multisampled resolve with pResolveAttachments | |
| I have written up a longer blog post about its implementation | |
| here. | |
| The default application scene renderer in `application/application.cpp` sets up | |
| a render graph which does: | |
| - Conditionally renders a shadow map covering entire scene | |
| - Renders a close shadow map | |
| - Automatically pulls in reflection/refraction render passes if present in the scene graph | |
| - Renders scene G-Buffer with deferred | |
| - Lighting pass (merged with G-Buffer pass into a single render pass) | |
| - Bloom threshold pass | |
| - Bloom pyramid downsampling | |
| - Async compute is kicked off to get average luminance of scene, adjusts exposure | |
| - Two upsampling steps to complete blurring in parallel with async | |
| - Tonemap (HDR + Bloom) rendered to backbuffer (sRGB) | |
| - (Potentially UI can be rendered on top with merged subpasses) | |
| ## Scene format | |
| glTF 2.0 with PBR materials is mostly supported. | |
| A custom JSON format is also added in order to plug multiple | |
| glTF files together for rapid prototyping of test scenes. | |
| ## Texture formats | |
| - PNG, JPG, TGA, HDR (via stb) | |
| - GTX (Granite Texture Format, custom texture format for compressed formats) | |
| ASTC, ETC2 and BCn/DXTn compressed formats are supported. | |
| ## `gltf-repacker` | |
| There's a tool to repack glTF models. | |
| Textures can be compressed to ASTC or BC using ISPC Texture Compressor. | |
| zeux's meshoptimizer library can also optimize meshes. | |
| The glTF emitted uses some Granite specific extras to be more optimal, so it's mostly for internal use. | |
| ## Compilers | |
| Tested on GCC, Clang, and MSVC 2017. | |
| ## Platforms | |
| - SDL3 (Linux / Windows) | |
| - `VK_KHR_display` (headless Linux w/ basic keyboard, mouse, gamepad support) | |
| - libretro Vulkan HW interface | |
| - Headless (benchmarking) | |
| - Custom surface plugin | |
| - Android | |
| ## Vulkan implementations tested | |
| - AMD Linux (Mesa, AMDVLK) | |
| - Intel Linux (Mesa) | |
| - AMD Windows | |
| - nVidia Linux | |
| - Arm Mali (Galaxy S7/S8/S9) | |
| - Pixel C tablet (Tegra X1) | |
| ## Build | |
| Plain CMake. Remember to check out submodules with `git submodule update --init`. | |
| ``` | |
| mkdir build | |
| cd build | |
| cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -G Ninja | |
| ninja -j16 # YMMV :3 | |
| ``` | |
| For MSVC, it should work to use the appropriate `-G` flag. | |
| There aren't any real samples yet, so not much to do unless you use Granite as a submodule. | |
| `viewer/gltf-viewer` is a basic glTF viewer used as my sandbox for more complex testing. | |
| Try some models from glTF-Sample-Models. | |
| ### Android | |
| Something ala: | |
| ``` | |
| cd viewer | |
| gradle build | |
| ``` | |
| Assets used in the default `gltf-viewer` target are pulled from `viewer/assets`. | |
| ### Third party software | |
| These are pulled in as submodules. | |
| - SDL3 | |
| - glslang | |
| - rapidjson | |
| - shaderc | |
| - SPIRV-Cross | |
| - SPIRV-Headers | |
| - SPIRV-Tools | |
| - stb | |
| - volk | |
| - meshoptimizer | |
| - Fossilize | |
| - muFFT | |
| - MikkTSpace (inlined into `third_party/mikktspace`) | |