High-Performance Interactive Scientific Visualization With Datoviz via the Vulkan Low-Level GPU API

The graphics and scientific industry is moving to newer low-level graphics APIs such as Vulkan, WebGPU, Metal and DirectX 12. The Khronos group introduced the Vulkan API in 2016. Vulkan has a huge barrier to entry: drawing a simple triangle using the Vulkan API directly involves about a thousand lines of code. In particular, all the logic related to the presentation of images to the screen, using a swapchain for double- or triple-buffering, all the synchronization of the different GPU tasks and CPU–GPU interactions in the main rendering loop must be done manually. To leverage the power of Vulkan for applications such as scientific visualization, there is a crucial need for intermediate-level libraries that drastically simplify the access to Vulkan. Vulkan provides low overhead, fine-grained control to the GPU, and GPU–CPU interactions. These features are essential when writing generic engines for video games or scientific visualization, although the latter has much less demanding requirements than the former.