Implementing Variable Rate Shading
In this chapter, we are going to implement a technique that has become quite popular recently: variable rate shading. This technique allows developers to specify at which rate to shade individual pixels while maintaining the same perceived visual quality. This approach allows us to reduce the time taken for some rendering passes, and the time savings can be used to implement more features or render at higher resolutions.
Vulkan provides multiple options to integrate this technique into an application, and we are going to provide an overview of all of them. This feature is provided through an extension that is supported only on recent hardware, but it’s possible to implement it manually using compute shaders. We won’t cover this option here, but we are going to point you to the relevant resources in the Further reading section.
In this chapter, we’ll cover the following main topics:
- Introducing variable rate shading...
