GPU Gems 2 was the best-selling book at the Game Developers Conference 2005 as well as SIGGRAPH 2005. It covers advanced graphics programming techniques as well as how to use the massive computational power of GPUs for other applications such as scientific computing and finance. GPU Gems 2 has been very well received by developers and was a Game Developer Magazine Front Line Award finalist in 2005. The book has been translated into Japanese and Chinese.

GPU Gems was the best-selling book at the Game Developers Conference 2004 as well as SIGGRAPH 2004. It covers advanced computer graphics for real-time applications using GPUs. GPU Gems has been very well received by the developers, winning a Game Developer Magazine Front Line Award in 2004. The book has been translated into Japanese and Chinese.

The Cg Tutorial was the best-selling book at the Game Developer Conference in 2003 as well as SIGGRAPH 2003. It held the top spot in Barnes & Noble’s "Computer Graphics" rankings for most of 2003. It has been used by many universities around the world and has been translated into Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Polish. At the Game Developers Conference 2005, Sony Computer Entertainment announced that Cg will be used as the shading language for the Sony PLAYSTATION 3.

This whitepaper explains how to easily integrate an efficient method for creating realistic soft shadows (Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows) on DirectX 10 and high-end DirectX 9 GPUs. The technique is used in many shipping games, as illustrated by the image at left showing it in the game Hellgate: London, developed by Flagship Studios. Each character's shadow varies in softness depending on the character's relationship with the ground.

Realistic soft shadows provide valuable cues about relationships between objects, becoming sharper at contact and more blurry (softer) the further they are apart. This sketch presents Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), a new method for generating perceptually accurate soft shadows. It requires no pre- or post-processing, nor additional geometry.  PCSS seamlessly replaces a traditional shadow map query (embodying the same advantages: independent of scene complexity, works with alpha testing, displacement mapping, and so on).  It runs fast on recent GPUs, and is used by many shipping games.

This chapter describes the architecture of the GeForce 6 Series GPUs from NVIDIA. We start with a general overview of where the GPU fits into the overall computer system, and then we describe the architecture along with details of specific features and performance characteristics.

This paper introduces the Adaptive Shadow Map (ASM) as a solution to shadow map aliasing. An ASM resolves pixel size mismatches between the eye view and the light source view by creating higher-resolution pieces of the shadow map as needed. ASMs enable dramatic improvements in shadow quality while maintaining interactive frame rates.

This thesis presents two adaptive, GPU-accelerated algorithms for shadow generation. The first algorithm, called Adaptive Shadow Maps, removes aliasing artifacts that typically result when using shadow maps. The second algorithm, called Adaptive Soft Shadows, attempts to generate soft shadows efficiently by varying the number of light samples used for different regions of the scene.