-- wiredweirdA comprehensive resource - but not for the noviceTruly Matt Pharr and NVIDIA are at the top of their game, and his "GPU Gems" series is certainly the only one of its kind for graphics professionals that are familiar with GPU's and shading languages already, and want to exploit them for the maximum speed and effect achievable using today's technology. The one section of the book that is pretty accessible to anyone with knowledge of computer architecture and computer graphics would be section 4 of the book, which is about general purpose computation on GPU's themselves. I notice that the table of contents is not shown by Amazon, so I list the articles here: PART 1:GEOMETRIC COMPLEXITY Towards Photorealism in Virtual Botany Terrain Rendering using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps Inside Geometry Instancing Segment Buffering Optimizing Resource Management with Multi-Streaming Hardware Occlusion Queries Made Useful Adaptive Tessellation of Subdivision Surfaces with Displacement Mapping Per-Pixel Displacement Mapping with Distance Functions PART 2:SHADING, LIGHTING, AND SHADOWS Deferred Shading in STALKER Real-Time Computation of Dynamic Irradiance Environment Maps Approximate Bidirectional Texture Functions Tile-Based Texture Mapping Implementing the Mental Images Phenomena Renderer on the GPU Dynamic Ambient Occlusion and Indirect Lighting Blueprint Rendering and "Sketchy Drawings" Accurate Atmospheric Scattering Efficient Soft-Edged Shadows Using Pixel Shader Branching Using Vertex Texture Displacement for Realistic Water Rendering Generic Refraction Simulation PART 3:HIGH-QUALITY RENDERING Fast Third-Order Texture Filtering High Quality Antialiased Rasterization Fast Prefiltered Lines Hair Animation and Rendering in the Nalu Demo Using Lookup Tables to Accelerate Color Transformations GPU Image Processing in Apple's Motion Implementing Improved Perlin Noise Advanced High-Quality Filtering Mipmap Level Measurement PART 4:GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTATION ON GPUS: A PRIMER Streaming Architectures and Technology Trends The GeForce 6 Series GPU Architecture Mapping Computational Concepts to GPUs GPU Computation Strategies and Tips Implementing Efficient Parallel Data Structures on GPUs Flow Control Idioms GPU Program Optimization Stream Reduction Operations for GPGPU Applications PART 5:IMAGE-ORIENTED COMPUTING Octree Textures on the GPU High-Quality Global Illumination Rendering Using Rasterization Global Illumination using Progressive Refinement Radiosity Computer Vision on the GPU Deferred Filtering: Rendering from Difficult Data Formats Conservative Rasterization PART 6:SIMULATION AND NUMERICAL ALGORITHMS GPU Computing for Protein Structure Prediction A GPU Framework for Solving Systems of Linear Equations Options Pricing on the GPU Improved GPU Sorting Flow Simulation with Complex Boundaries Medical Image Reconstruction with the FFT Excellent Second Book in the GPU Gems SeriesThis book is the second installment of the GPU Gems book series by NVIDIA. The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of GPU programming. The first part of the book contains 8 chapters on photo-realistic rendering that mostly deal with how to efficiently render a large number of objects in a scene, which is a necessity for rendering convincing natural effects, such as grass or trees. Other interesting topics in this part of the book include adaptive tessellation of surfaces on the GPU, displacement mapping - an extension to the popular parallax mapping used in some current games - that allows to render realistic bumps on a simple quad, and terrain rendering with geometry clipmaps. Part two of the book consisting of 11 chapters deals with shading and lighting. Furthermore, this part of the book has chapters on rendering atmospheric scattering, implementing bidirectional texture functions on the GPU, dynamic ambient occlusion culling, water rendering, and using shadow mapping with percentage-closer filtering to achieve soft shadows. The third part of the book consists of 9 chapters on high-quality rendering. The chapters in the fourth part of the book represent an introduction to the fantastic field of GPGPU. The 6 chapters of part five of the book are on image-oriented computing and describe a number of GPGPU algorithms for performing global illumination computations, for example by using radiosity, on the GPU. There is also a chapter on doing computer vision on the GPU The final chapter in this part of the book explains how to perform conservative rasterization, which is important for some GPGPU algorithms to achieve accurate results. The final part of the book has 6 chapters that present GPGPU techniques to perform a variety of simulation and numerical algorithms on the GPU. The book contains many illustrations and diagrams that visualize the results of certain techniques or explain the presented algorithms in more detail. The book also comes with a CD-ROM with supplemental material, videos, and demo applications to some chapters. I highly recommend this book to any professional working as graphics or game developer.