Sometimes Computer Graphics seems like black magic. There are a few tutorials for fundamentals but often I find myself longing for very basic projects to analyze and eventually grasp the underlying concepts of more advanced rendering techniques.
This project aims to provide such a basic project to showcases how to achieve bindless rendering with DirectX 12 and Shader Model 6.6.
Bindless rendering refers to a technique with which we can directly access descriptors in a shader via an index into global descriptor heaps (ResourceDescriptorHeap or SamplerDescriptorHeap).
This vastly simplifies descriptor and pipeline state management:
- No need to bind Resource Views ( aka
descriptors, e.g. constant buffer views, shader resource views, ... ) - No need to manage root signature permutations.
- No need to manage Vertex Layouts. Vertex attributes are directly accessed by indexing into a bindless
SRVviaVertexID. All we need to do is set the Index Buffer.
cbuffer PerDrawConstants : register(b0, space0)
{
uint32 pos_buffer_index;
};
VSOutput Main(uint vertex_id : SV_VertexID)
{
StructuredBuffer<float4> pos_buffer = ResourceDescriptorHeap[pos_buffer_index];
float4 pos = pos_buffer[vertex_id];
// ...
}
If you just want to explore how bindless rendering works, I encourage you to check out the following files:
Source/Renderer.cpp and Source/Shaders/bindless_vs.hlsl.
The code inside this repository was only written for learning purposes. I never really tried to make it beautiful, easy to read, performant or 100% correct. In the end, all I wanted to do is to explore the API. Now I share my code so other people doing the same may be inspired by my journey.
- Windows 11 (may also work with Windows 10 though)
- A modern GPU (tested on RTX 3060 ti)
- Visual Studio 2022
- Windows SDK (tested with
10.0.226201.0, installed via VS2022)
- Execute
GenerateProjectFiles.bat. This will invoke Premake5 to generate a solution for VS2022.- The DirectX12 Agility SDK will be automatically fetched via Nuget.
- Open the generated solution (
BasicBindless.sln) - Build and run the
BasicBindlessproject in your desired configuration, e.g.DebugorRelease.
WASD- Move forward / left / backward / rightSpace- Move upCtrl- Move downHold right click- Change view direction