NBN

NBN is a light Vulkan abstraction library. It's heavily opinionated and is only designed to run on my machines.

• Vulkan 1.3
• Fully bindless, only has a single global descriptor set
• Basic multi-queue support
• Raytracing and mesh shader support
• Dynamic rendering only
• 10-bit sRGB swapchain by default

Projects

I've used it to write a number of projects:

Guassian Point Splatting

• Based on Gaussian Point Splatting by Rijsdijk et al.
• Can handle scenes of up to around 300 million splats
• Uses a compressed splat format, see tools/splat-compress.

Intel Jungle Labs Scene Raytracing

• Heavily instanced ray traced scene with 300 billion triangles total
• Denoising via NRD

Voxelizer

• GPU mesh voxelizer via rasterization into voxel lists
• Compresses material to 24 color bits, 2 type bits (dielectric/metallic/emissive) and 6 auxillery bits (roughness/log10 emissive strength)
• CPU-side radix sorting and writing into 64-tree via morton encoded locations

Lightmapper

• Hardware RT lightmapper for glTF scenes
• Environment map importance sampling via an alias table
• Multiple importance sampling to handle both bounces and environment samples
• More info on my blog: https://expenses.github.io/2026/05/07/lightmapper.html

MIS in action

Neural Texture Compression

• Closely based on the paper 'Hardware Accelerated Neural Block Texture Compression with Cooperative Vectors' by Belcour and Benyoub
• Backwards pass via Slang auto differentiation
• Simulated BC1 latent texture sampling in software
• ADAM optimizer for weights, latent textures apply ADAM sparsely using a bitmask to find non-zero gradients
• Uses cooperative matrices via neural.slang

Meshlet Renderer

• Slightly out of date
• Both Instance and meshlet frustum/cone culling
• Visibility buffer rendering