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The Art of Render Graphs

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Blog Intermediate

Ali Elmorsy

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Description

The Art of Render Graphs is a February 2026 technical blog post by Ali Elmorsy on designing a Vulkan render graph while building a game engine.

It defines a render graph as a DAG of passes with resource dependency edges, then covers automatic ordering, unused-pass culling, and barrier generation from declared reads and writes. Implementation notes include class and function passes, a texture builder, AccessType usages, lifetime analysis, topological compile, side-effect roots, and transient allocation.

It is for intermediate engine programmers comfortable with Vulkan command buffers who are past a few hard-coded passes. Engine versus game-authored passes and optional reordering are design goals.

The article is a free GitHub Pages post with C++ sketches, compile pseudocode, and dependency examples.

It is useful as a concrete Vulkan walkthrough of why render graphs reduce barrier mistakes when adding shadows, lighting, post, and UI.