What does it take to simulate a vast, living virtual world in real-time without tanking performance?
In this post, we dig into the lowest and most fundamental levels of our engine architecture, where we represent hundreds of thousands of entities using a blend of data-oriented design, ECS principles, and one of the most underrated tools in the programmer's toolbox: virtual memory.
Vulkan delivers exceptional performance at the cost of verbose code and meticulous resource management, making even basic rendering operations unnecessarily complex. All this verbosity kills rapid experimentation and makes simple tasks tedious.
At 3dverse, we built a visual render graph system on top of Vulkan that replaces hundreds of lines of boilerplate with connected nodes that automatically handle the low-level details.
In this post, I'll demonstrate our approach with a simple screen-clearing example, reveal the production PBR render graph powering our cloud rendering platform, and finally if you are still around, preview our new ray tracing capabilities.
Streaming real-time XR to the web sounds great, until latency ruins the experience.
In this post, we explain how we made server-side rendering not just usable, but comfortable in XR, using a few clever tricks to smooth out the delay and keep everything feeling grounded, even when the network isn’t.
In the end of 2023 Vulkan released Vulkan Video extensions which allowed for GPU-accelerated encoding of H.264 and H.265 video. This was bleeding edge stuff: these extensions provided a GPU-agnostic solution for video compression which did not exist previously. At 3dverse, our renderer was dependent on NVIDIA solely because of video encoding, so this new solution would finally make us GPU-agnostic!
However. To this day, there is very limited information online to help someone implement anything with these extensions. The following is a semi-rageful but triumphant account of working with Vulkan Video from the vantage point of an engine programmer who had no previous experience with Vulkan, or any video compression codecs.
