Procedural Displacement (Vulkan)

The goal is to create tesselation free procedural displacement. This implementation was created alongside a bachelor thesis (see the .pdf file). Forgive me for sloppy code, the program had to be ready in time and the coding style and performance suffered from it.

Dependencies

You will need several dependencies to compile and run this program.

Ray Tracing Compatible Graphics Card

Not all graphics cards support vulkan raytracing. You will have to see for yourself if your card support the necessary extensions. When running the program, it will throw an error if an extension is missing and also show which one in the console output. An unofficial website so check if your GPU supports the VK_KHR_acceleration_structure extension can be found here.

Graphics Card Driver

While your graphics card driver only has to support at least Vulkan 1.3, it is recommended to just update to the latest version. NVIDIA drivers can be found on NVIDIAs official website and AMD drivers can be found on AMDs official website.

CMake

A version of CMake is required to build the project.

nvpro_core

NVIDIAs nvpro_core is the framework on which this program is built. You will need to clone it from Github. The nvpro_core folder should be on the same level as the vk_procedural_displacement folder.

VulkanSDK

This program runs on the graphics card using the Vulkan API, so a version of the VulkanSDK is required. Which specific version is needed depends on the version of nvpro_core, but a version higher than 1.3.221.0 is recommended.

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Setup

• install all dependencies listed above
• create a build directory inside of the vk_procedural_displacement folder
• open cmd -> navigate to build directory -> type cmake..
• open the Visual Studio solution named vk_procedural_displacement that can be found inside the build directory
• in Visual Studio, right click on vk_ray_tracing__displacement_KHR -> Set as Startup Project
• now you can start running the program via the built in compiler