Customer Reviews

ShaderX2: Shader Programming Tips and Tricks with DirectX 9.0

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The main sets of Tips'n'Tricks are about what you might expect: planets, suns, iridescence, water, depth of field blur, and so on. There are a few unusual ones, as well - posterization, interesting filters, even ray-tracing and general purpose computation.

The disk was a bit disappointing. Almost all of the demos worked, and none of them were come-ons for anyone's products. That's the good news. There were far fewer demos than chapters in the book, though - some of the sections that interested me most did not have support on the CD. At very least, some of that CD space could have been used for a still-picture gallery to supplement the limited color section in the book. Oh, well.

If you're an absolutely dedicated graphics programmer, this may offer a few items of interest. As with other tips'n'tricks books, there is no real progression through the material - it's a grab bag, and you may or may not grab an item that meets your needs.

//wiredweird

An old, classic book that wouldn't have a place in modern computer graphics except for one thing: the emergence of mobile. Although these techniques are dated and somewhat archaic on PC and console systems, they're perfect for use on mobile GPUs as seen in popular iOS and Android based devices.