Future geometry pipeline

Lately I’ve been interested in modernizing the geometry pipeline in the rendering engine, for example reducing the vertex shaders. It’s a well known fact that geometry shaders are not making efficient use of the GPU hardware, but similar issues could apply for vertex and tessellation shaders too, just because there is a need for pushing data through multiple pipeline stages. This can result in memory traffic and allocation bottlenecks between geometry and pixel stages.

Read More »

Bindless Descriptors

The Vulkan and DX12 graphics devices now support bindless descriptors in Wicked Engine. Earlier and in DX11, it was only possible to access textures, buffers (resource descriptors) and samplers in the shaders by binding them to specific slots. First, the binding model limitations will be described briefly, then the bindless model will be discussed.

Read More »