This is a simple demo that demonstrates how to use Vulkan compute shaders to path-trace a simple scene / calculate the Mandelbrot set on the GPU. The code is heavily commented, so it can be seen as a rough getting-started tutorial for using Vulkan compute shaders.
The only depdendencies are Vulkan and lodepng, which is merely used for png encoding. The Vulkan SDK can be installed from lunarg.com
Since on macOS, Vulkan does not support double-precision floats, 64-bit floats are emulated using two 32-bit single-precision floats where necessary.
The application launches a compute shader that renders a simple scene using path tracing / calculates the Mandelbrot set, and writes resulting pixels into a storage buffer.
The storage buffer is then transferred from GPU- to CPU memory, and saved as .png.
The project uses a bare-bones Makefile, which can also be run on Windows using mingw32-make -f Makefile.win32 (tested with tdm-gcc v10.3.0 installation on Windows 10).
When running the created programs, the png files named mandelbrot.png / pathtracer.png are created.
Starting the path-tracer application will result in a 900x600 image that uses 500 samples per pixel. The first command-line parameter changes the samples per pixel to be used, the second parameter determines the vertical resolution in pixels - the horizontal resolution is always 1.5 times the vertical resultion, since the camera model simulates a sensor that is 36 x 24 mm.