Customer Reviews

ShaderX3: Advanced Rendering with DirectX and OpenGL (Charles River Media Graphics)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

I've bought many other rendering books like GPU Gems series, and I think this book is more practical for game developers compared with the other books. It explains many useful algorithms in good details and covers many aspects that a serious game developer should consider. As a game engine programmer, I think this book is a very good reference for me.

This book is a collection of forty-seven 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 ATI, the video card manufacturer, a number work for gaming companies, or for companies producing software used in gaming.

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.

Shader X3: Advanced Rendering With DirectX And Open GL compiled, organized, and deftly edited by Wolfgang Engle (Senior Special FX Engineer at Wings Simulations) is packed from cover to cover with 630-pages of insightful new techniques, innovative approaches to common problems, as well as practical tools and tricks that will help in all areas of shader programming. All of the articles comprising Shader X3 evolved from the the working experiences of industry professionals, and all of the sections were expertly edited by shader programming experts. This comprehensive collection of ready-to-use techniques will enable even the most novice programmer to get up to speed quickly, and the more experienced programmers will find a wealth of insights and techniques to improve efficiency and avoid redundancies. Shader X3 is an essential, "user friendly", and highly recommended instructional reference for shader programmers.