Spectrum

Features

Rendering backend

• DX12
• Vulkan backend (WIP)
• Async Compute
• DX12 Work Graphs
• GPU meshlet generation / mesh shader pipeline
• DirectStorage-accelerated asset streaming

FrameGraph

• Automatic resource transitions
• Easy resource binding
• GBuffer deferred rendering pipeline
• GPU Occlusion Culling
• Virtual/tiled texture streaming (sparse-residency GPU virtual texturing)

Ray tracing & GI

• DXR
• Raytraced shadows
• Raytraced reflections
• Sparse Voxel GI with "infinite" bounces
• NRD denoising (REBLUR + SIGMA)
• Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) and cascaded shadow maps (PSSM)

Upscaling & anti-aliasing

• DLSS / DLSS Ray Reconstruction (via NVIDIA Streamline)
• AMD FSR upscaling
• SMAA antialiasing

Assets & content

• Asset System with hot-reload file watching for shaders/assets
• Assimp mesh import, plus a custom RW4 importer
• Material Graphs with live preview
• Font/text rendering (FreeType-based)

Tools & engine infrastructure

• GUI
• Runtime-tunable properties (Variable<T>) with an in-app debug panel
• CPU/GPU profiling (scoped PROFILE/PROFILE_GPU markers)
• FrameGraph live debugger: pass/resource inspector, GPU pass timeline with barrier visualization, and a pannable/zoomable resource preview (2D/array/3D/cube textures and buffers)
• Prism, a declaration language for GPU/CPU structs, bindings, PSOs and FrameGraph passes (ANTLR4-driven prismc generates HLSL + C++ from .prism files), with a Visual Studio extension for highlighting, live diagnostics and navigation

Build system

• Sharpmake (C#-based) generates Visual Studio 2026 project files from main.sharpmake.cs
• vcpkg manifest-mode dependency management (vcpkg.json), with a custom overlay registry
• Debug / Profile / Retail configurations
• CI on GitHub Actions (windows-2025-vs2026 runners) builds Retail and uploads workdir artifacts

C++

• C++23, built extensively around C++ modules (.ixx module interfaces) rather than classic headers
• Layered module/include architecture (Modules → Core → HAL → RenderSystem → Spectrum), each layer force-including the one below via a chained Defines.h
• Third-party libraries (assimp, cereal, antlr4, DirectXTex, DirectStorage, freetype, jinja2cpp, ...) wrapped as C++ modules under sources/Modules/

Code generation

Large parts of the engine are generated rather than hand-written. The source of truth is Prism, the engine's declaration language: .prism files in sources/Prism/defs/ declare GPU/CPU shared structs and their slot bindings, root layouts, graphics/compute/raytracing/work-graph PSOs, FrameGraph passes and pipelines, enums, constants and HLSL helper functions. The prismc compiler (sources/Prism/, ANTLR4 grammar Prism.g4, Jinja2 templates) validates them and generates, into autogen/ directories that are checked in but never edited by hand:

• HAL (sources/HAL/autogen/): binding tables and slots, root layouts, PSOs with permutation keys, raytracing PSOs, enums, constants
• FrameGraph (sources/RenderSystem/FrameGraph/autogen/): per-pass headers with generated setup (resource creation/needs, enable conditions), pipelines, pass_ids.h, resource_ids.h, pass_defaults.*, context dependency tables
• HLSL (workdir/shaders/autogen/): the matching shader-side structs, layouts, raytracing and work-graph node headers

Regenerate after editing a .prism file with Tools → Regenerate Prism code in Visual Studio, or cd sources/Prism && ../../bin/profile/prismc.exe; run generate_project.bat when generated files were added or removed. A mistake in a .prism file stops generation with file(line,col): error: messages and writes nothing.

The Visual Studio extension (bin/editor/prism.vsix, built by sources/Prism/editor/gen_vs_extension.py) adds highlighting, live errors with quick fixes, go-to-definition, hover, completion, outline and the regenerate command.

Language reference for developers: overview/Prism.txt.

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