CppCon 2017

In recent years, the GPU graphics community has seen the introduction of many new GPU programming APIs like Khronos' Vulkan, Microsoft's Direct3D 12, and Apple's Metal. These APIs present much more control of GPU hardware, but bring with them a great increase in complexity. We need to rethink the way we do graphics programming to take advantage of new features, while also keeping complexity under control.

This talk presents solutions to recurring programming problems with these new GPU graphics APIs. These solutions are intended to simplify the complexity of the API by an order of magnitude, while simultaneously improving overall performance. This talk aims to discuss some key techniques for other developers to create their own GPU rendering engine.

Topics covered include using a ring buffer to stream data and descriptors from CPU to GPU, scheduling GPU memory and work from the CPU, designing a multi-pass real-time GPU renderer, and using fork/join parallelism to increase the performance of the CPU code that submits GPU work.