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This book is a must-have for anyone serious about rendering in real time. With the announcement of new ray tracing APIs and hardware to support them, developers can easily create real-time applications with ray tracing as a core component. As ray tracing on the GPU becomes faster, it will play a more central role in real-time rendering. Ray Tracing Gems provides key building blocks for developers of games, architectural applications, visualizations, and more. Experts in rendering share their knowledge by explaining everything from nitty-gritty techniques that will improve any ray tracer to mastery of the new capabilities of current and future hardware.
What you´ll learn:

The latest ray tracing techniques for developing real-time applications in multiple domains

Guidance, advice, and best practices for rendering applications with Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR)

How to implement high-performance graphics for interactive visualizations, games, simulations, and more

Who this book is for:

Developers who are looking to leverage the latest APIs and GPU technology for real-time rendering and ray tracing

Students looking to learn about best practices in these areas

Enthusiasts who want to understand and experiment with their new GPUs

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Part 1: Ray Tracing Basics

1. Ray Tracing Terminology

2. What is a Ray?

3. Introduction to DirectX Raytracing

4. A Planetarium Dome Master Camera

5. Computing Minima and Maxima of Subarrays

Part 2: Intersections and Efficiency

6. A Fast and Robust Method for Avoiding Self-Intersection

7. Precision Improvements for Ray/Sphere Intersection

8. Cool Patches: A Geometric Approach to Ray/Bilinear Patch Intersections

9. Multi-Hit Ray Tracing in DXR

10. A Simple Load-Balancing Scheme with High Scaling Efficiency

Part 3: Reflections, Refractions, and Shadows

11. Automatic Handling of Materials in Nested Volumes

12. A Microfacet-Based Shadowing Function to Solve the Bump Terminator Problem

13. Ray Traced Shadows: Maintaining Real-Time Frame Rates

14. Ray-Guided Volumetric Water Caustics in Single Scattering Media with DXR

Part 4: Sampling

15. On the Importance of Sampling

16. Sample Transformations Zoo

17. Ignoring the Inconvenient When Tracing Rays

18. Importance Sampling of Many Lights on the GPU

Part 5: Denoising and Filtering

19. Cinematic Rendering in UE4 with Real-Time Ray Tracing and Denoising

20. Texture Level of Detail Strategies for Real-Time Ray Tracing

21. Simple Environment Map Filtering Using Ray Cones and Ray Differentials

22. Improving Temporal Antialiasing with Adaptive Ray Tracing

Part 6: Hybrid Approaches and Systems

23. Interactive Light Map and Irradiance Volume Preview in Frostbite

24. Real-Time Global Illumination with Photon Mapping

25. Hybrid Rendering for Real-Time Ray Tracing

26. Deferred Hybrid Path Tracing

27. Interactive Ray Tracing Techniques for High-Fidelity Scientific Visualization

Part 7: Global Illumination

28. Ray Tracing Inhomogeneous Volumes

29. Efficient Particle Volume Splatting in a Ray Tracer

30. Caustics Using Screen Space Photon Mapping

31. Variance Reduction via Footprint Estimation in the Presence of Path Reuse

32. Accurate Real-Time Specular Reflections with Radiance Caching

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Tomas Akenine-M ö ller is a Distinguished Research Scientist at NVIDIA, Sweden, since 2016, and currently on leave from his position as professor in computer graphics at Lund University. Tomas couathored Real-Time Rendering and Immersive Linear Algebra, and has written 100+ research papers. Previously, he worked at Ericsson Research and Intel.


Eric Haines currently works at NVIDIA on interactive ray tracing. He co-authored the books Real-Time Rendering, 4th Edition and An Introduction to Ray Tracing, edited The Ray Tracing News, and cofounded the Journal of Graphics Tools and the Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques. He is also the creator and lecturer for the Udacity MOOC Interactive 3D Graphics.

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