Obsidian

Obsidian is an extensive abstraction layer around multiple graphics APIs allowing for performance-based rendering. Heavily inspired by NVRHI, but with a more modern API and more abstraction.

Features

• Low-Level Explicit Control: Maintain full control over rendering through CommandLists, Buffers, and Image resources without hiding important GPU concepts.

• Backend Abstraction (Vulkan & DX12): Abstracts both Vulkan and Direct3D 12 with a unified API while staying close to the metal, offering predictable performance and behavior.

• Stack-Allocated, No-VTable Architecture: API-agnostic types like Image, Buffer, and CommandList are lightweight and stack-allocated, eliminating runtime overhead from virtual tables or dynamic memory allocation.

• Compile-Time Backend Selection: Backend (Vulkan or DX12) is selected at compile-time, removing runtime branching and maximizing performance and binary simplicity.

• Staging Resources: Built-in support for staging images and buffers to assist with resource uploads and readbacks.

• Automatic barrier insertion: Maintain low-level control over GPU operations while leveraging automatic barrier tracking

• Minimal Runtime Dependencies: Focused on keeping the runtime lightweight, with no mandatory heap allocations or reflection systems.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Ensure you have the following installed on your system:

• Vulkan SDK (Required for Vulkan API, windows, linux & macos)

• Windows SDK (Required for DX12 API, windows only)

• A C++23 or later compiler (e.g., MSVC, GCC, or Clang)

• Build tools: Make (Linux/Windows) or Visual Studio 2022 (Windows) or XCode (MacOS)

Building

Build instructions for this project can be found in the BUILDING.md file. Supported platforms are:

• Windows: Visual Studio 2022, Make
• Linux: Make
• MacOS: XCode

Programming Guide

// TODO: ...

Samples

// TODO: ...

TODO List

• Pushconstants
• Bindless support
• Tesselation control
• Dynamic buffers
• Add profiling scopes to Dx12 API
• Vulkan
  • Pushconstants
  • Bindless support
  • Tesselation control
  • Dynamic buffers
• Dx12
  • Bindless support
  • Pushconstants
  • Tesselation control
  • Dynamic buffers
• Metal
  • Window
  • Device
  • Other...

Tested Platforms (API, OS, GPU & Display Manager)

This is a list of platforms of where I have personally ran all tests.
Unless explicitly stated all of these platforms should work even when untested.

• Dx12
  • Windows
    • NVIDIA
    • AMD
    • Intel
• Vulkan
  • Windows
    • NVIDIA
    • AMD
    • Intel
  • Linux
    • X11
      • NVIDIA
      • AMD
      • Intel
    • Wayland
      • NVIDIA
      • AMD
      • Intel
  • MacOS
    • Intel
    • M(X)

Additional information

Apart from the main development happening in the main (or dev) branch, there's an imgui branch that includes Dear ImGui integration for Obsidian. This branch is designed to make it easy to plug in GUI support without adding clutter to the core abstraction layers in the main branch.

Inside the Sandbox project, you’ll also find several example applications demonstrating usage of Obsidian.

• TexturedQuad Example: Loads and renders an image using stb_image, working for all supported backends.
• TinyObjLoader Example: Loads and renders 3D models using tinyobjloader, again working across all supported backends.

License

This project is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. See LICENSE for details.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please fork the repository and create a pull request with your changes.

Third-Party Libraries

• GLFW - Windowing and input handling
• glm - Mathematics library for graphics
• tracy - Realtime sampling profiler
• Nano - Additional utilities
• VMA - Vulkan Memory Allocator
• D3D12MA - D3D12 Memory Allocator
• shaderc - Shader compilation for GLSL and HLSL
• SPIRV-Cross - Transpiling shader code