Features

Rendering Architecture

• Vulkan 1.4 GPU-driven renderer
• Mesh shader pipeline with visibility-buffer deferred rendering
• GPU address table enabling a fully bindless indirect buffer architecture
• GPU-driven instance culling and draw-command generation
• Descriptor indexing for bindless resource access
• Push descriptors for transient/runtime render targets
• Retained-mode render graph
• Async compute with multithreaded secondary command-buffer recording
• Multithreaded job system powered by EnkiTS

Lighting & Shading

• Physically based rendering using Cook–Torrance GGX with Disney diffuse
• Split-sum image-based lighting with prefiltered specular environment maps and BRDF LUT
• Spherical harmonic irradiance for diffuse environment lighting
• Clustered lighting for point, spot, and area lights
• Screen-space global illumination using visibility-bitmask AO with indirect lighting (XeGTAO-based)
• Ray-traced reflections with NRD REBLUR denoising
• Ray-traced soft sun shadows with NRD SIGMA denoising
• Cascaded shadow maps with PCF and PCSS filtering
• Screen-space contact shadows based on Bend Studio's technique
• Shadow-mapped flashlight
• Ray-marched directional volumetric lighting

Geometry & Visibility

• Meshoptimizer-based mesh processing
• GPU Hi-Z depth pyramid generation
• GPU-driven visibility and occlusion culling
• Forward+ transparent rendering
• Order-independent transparency (OIT)
• Debug rendering for OBBs, wireframes, and other scene geometry

Temporal & Post Processing

• Temporal anti-aliasing (TAA)
• ACES Film tonemapping
• Bloom
• Lens flare
• Chromatic aberration
• Spartan Engine-inspired bloom and chromatic aberration implementations

Assets & Tooling

• glTF 2.0 cached asset pipeline
• Block-compressed texture support
• ImGui debugging and renderer controls
• Tracy CPU/GPU profiling integration

Legacy rendering paths

Older anti-aliasing implementations are retained for reference, testing, and comparison. They are not part of the current rendering pipeline.

• SMAA
• CMAA2 (Intel)
• FXAA

Future

• Runtime asset loading and management
• Dynamic mesh, material, and light interactions
• Auto exposure
• Gran Turismo 7-style tonemapping
• Physically based light units
• Atmospheric scattering sky and sun model
• Planar reflections
• Parallax-corrected cubemaps
• Water rendering
• Froxel Volumetrics
• Further TAA quality improvements
• Lens flare quality improvements
• Ray-traced global illumination (RTGI)
• Restir lighting
• Ray-traced transmission

Screenshots

Controls

• W A S D - Move forward, left, backward, and right
• Space - Move up
• Ctrl - Move down
• Right Click + Mouse - Look around
• R - Reset camera to spawn/origin
• Tab - Toggle ImGui editor
• P - Toggle ImGui profiling/statistics window
• F - Toggle flashlight
• Esc - Exit application

Build Requirements

• Windows 10/11
• NVIDIA RTX 20-series+ or AMD RDNA 2+
• Vulkan SDK 1.4+
• Visual Studio 2026

Build Steps

Open the project file in Visual Studio 2026 and build the solution.

Assets

Bistro and San Miguel assets:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/2h6jnyho16z7w0lpjah9w/AIV4BUCfhIbN1sC1hEYl8BI?rlkey=4zdox8dw65t7n5hejpvm4nepz&st=q4nrzvub&dl=0

Intel Sponza can be downloaded from Intel's Graphics Research samples and loaded directly as glTF:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/topic-technology/graphics-research/samples.html