Understanding frame graphs

So far, the rendering in the Raptor Engine has consisted of one pass only. While this approach has served us well for the topics we have covered, it won’t scale for some of the later chapters. More importantly, it wouldn’t be representative of how modern rendering engines organize their work. Some games and engines implement hundreds of passes, and having to manually manage them can become tedious and error-prone.

Thus, we decided this was a good time in the book to introduce a frame graph. In this section, we are going to present the structure of our graph and the main interfaces to manipulate it in the code.

Let’s start with the basic concepts of a graph.

Building a graph

Before we present our solution and implementation for the frame graph, we would like to provide some of the building blocks that we are going to use throughout the chapter. If you’re familiar with frame graphs, or graphs in general, feel free to...