Shader X4: Advanced Rendering Techniques [With CDROM]

Its hard for me to treat the books of this series separately (ShaderX 3, ShaderX 4, ShaderX 5). They are all very good books of GPU-Gems level or higher. In comparison with GPU Gems, they are more academic, i. e. they are rather short and more applicable to wide range of applications then GPU Gems ones (while GPU Gems series is more scientific, state of the art, considering one particular research) and the accompanying CD is much more better (lots of working examples, most with source code). Sections (Image-Space, Shadows) are also very helpful to figure out what is useful for you. This series is not for beginners anyway, so please, go Cg Tutorial or DX SDK Tutorial and don't put 2 or 3 marks for these books because you can't cope with them.

Wolfgang Engel edits SHADER X4: ADVANCED RENDERING TECHNIQUES, a toolbox of advanced graphics hardware and software techniques for any student of graphics programming. SHADER X4 especially lends to classroom use, with its articles covering everything from interlaced rendering and fog volume issues to real-time environment mapping and Shader subsystems. While the coverage can help novices, it's especially noted for advanced graphics programmers who will relish the equations, charts, and more technical discussions.

This book is the best than previous editions. Each article is a source of ideas for developing your engine or demo. If you want to know where the state of art is arrived, buy this book.

This is the fourth edition in this series of books on advanced graphics. This book is a collection of forty-three articles around the common theme of shading images in real time. Many of these effects have been common in the movie world for many years, but in that application the shading can be done on very expensive machines and the time it takes to produce an image is not important because the resulting image is to be shown on screen rather than immediately on a display. Now, with the increasing power in the PC's in widespread use, these techniques are being brought down to the standard desktop. In this book a wide selection of authors discuss the start of the art in shading. They are, for the most part, active professionally in the graphics display business. A number of them work for video card companies, a number work for gaming companies, or for companies producing software used in gaming. Many are involved with the computer science departments of universities around the world where the most advanced image programming is being researched. This approach provides for a fast time to print, rather than one author taking a year to write the book. In this industry a year is a lifetime, well, at least a generation in the software.