GPU Gems 2: Programming Techniques for High-performance Graphics and General-purpose Computation [Hardcover]

"GPU Gems 2" edited by Matt Pharr (Addison-Wesley, 2005, ISBN 0-321-33559-7) is a collection of forty-eight white papers that detail cutting edge techniques based on today's latest graphical processing units (GPU). The full color hardcover text is 784 pages and includes a CD-ROM with working demos and source for some of the articles presented in the book. The text retails for $59.99.

The book is divided into six parts: geometric complexity, shading, high-quality rendering, general purpose computation on the GPU, image oriented computing, and numerical algorithms. A part has anywhere from five to twelve chapters. Each chapter is written by a different author but the format and style is consistent. The chapters have an introduction, discussion of the problem or technique, conclusion, and references. The material is presented with color illustrations and occasionally some pseudo-code or code fragments. Generally, the material is extremely current and very approachable to read.

As a sequel to its well received predecessor, the text focuses on taking advantage of the computational power and features of today's high-powered GPU boards. The first part of the book, geometric complexity, emphasizes this with chapters dedicated to batch rendering, using multi-streaming, hardware occlusion, and displacement pixel-shaders. Each chapter illustrates how operations traditionally performed on the CPU can be moved into the GPU for efficiency and greater effect.

The subsequent two parts on shading and rendering continue along the same theme: improved performance by using hardware functionality found on the GPU. Each topic considers the performance ramifications and GPU capabilities when discussing the problem domain of a rendering technique and factors it into the final solution. For example, chapter 10 considers irradiance environment maps for fast lighting - but with a twist - using the GPU to do the calculations in real-time. In doing so, the book's real value becomes apparent.

The fourth part on general purpose GPU computation is an interesting addition to the text. The chapters illustrate methods of offloading traditional CPU tasks by exploiting the inherent parallel nature of modern GPU hardware. Since the book features Nvidia hardware, the architecture and performance capabilities largely focused on their products.

In the fifth part of the book, hardware assisted image creation and analysis is considered. By using context clues from the spatial, texture, or lighting data - additional refinements can be made to a scene prior to rasterization. The topics presented in this part are further refinements of the text's main theme (using the GPU fully) and are specific solutions to uncommon problems - or approaches to rasterization. None the less as GPUs continue to evolve, the topics presented in this section will undoubtedly become more common.

Finally, the sixth part of the book provides several non-traditional graphics examples to illustrate calculating data on the GPU: solving linear equations, options pricing, and numerical simulation - just to name a few. As using the raw floating point power of modern GPU is a growing trend - these sections were quite interesting and well done.

The included CD-ROM contains examples to 28 of the 48 articles in the book. In most cases, the example material includes source code as well as pre-compiled binaries to help illustrate the topic presented in the text. In order to run the majority of the samples, Cg must be installed on the host computer. In addition, the CD-ROM provides access to Nvidia's software development kit, Cg toolkit, performance tools, and several helpful reference links to on-line sites.

GPU Gems 2 provides a cutting edge view of the capabilities found in today's video cards. The selected articles illustrate that every part of the rendering process can be enhanced in some fashion by fully using the underlying hardware. As such, this book is essential to anyone working with modern GPUs.

This book is the second installment of the GPU Gems book series by NVIDIA. Just like the first book, GPU Gems 2 is a collection of articles by various authors from game development companies, academia, and tool developers on advanced techniques for programming graphics processing units (or GPUs for short). It is aimed at intermediate to advanced graphics developers that are familiar with the most common graphics APIs. The reader should also be proficient in C++. As with the first GPU Gems book, GPU Gems 2 is not for beginners. For professional graphics and game developers, however, it is an excellent collection of interesting techniques, tips, and tricks.

The book is divided into six parts, each dealing with a different aspect of GPU programming. Compared to the first book, more emphasis is put on the quickly evolving area of general-purpose computation on GPUs (also called GPGPU). In particular, the last three of the six parts of the book are about GPGPU and its applications. The first three parts, however, are about real-time computer graphics.

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. Two chapters in this part of the book discuss geometry instancing and segment buffering, and another chapter focuses on using occlusion queries to implement coherent hierarchical occlusion culling.

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. This part contains highly interesting chapters on deferred shading in the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and computing irradiance environment maps on the GPU in real-time. 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. Most chapters in this part deal with implementing high-quality filtering in fragment shaders. For example, there is an interesting chapter on filtered line rendering and another chapter on cubic texture filtering. Finally, a GPU-only implementation of improved Perlin Noise is also presented in this part of the book.

The chapters in the fourth part of the book represent an introduction to the fantastic field of GPGPU. The 8 chapters of this part first describe the general streaming architecture of GPUs, and then move on to show how to map conventional CPU data structures and algorithms to the GPU. For example, textures can be regarded as the GPU equivalent to CPU data arrays. There is also a chapter on how to implement flow-control idioms on the GPU and a chapter on optimizing GPU programs.

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. One chapter shows how to map linear algebra operations onto the GPU and develops a GPU framework to solve systems of linear equations. In other chapters the GPU is used for protein structure prediction, options pricing, flow simulation, and medical image reconstruction. These chapters show good examples of how the GPU can be used for non-graphics-related tasks.

The book contains many illustrations and diagrams that visualize the results of certain techniques or explain the presented algorithms in more detail. All images in the book are in color, which is definitely advantageous for a graphics book. In my opinion, the excellent quality and also the quantity of images and illustrations is one of the strongest points of this book compared to other graphics books.

The book also comes with a CD-ROM with supplemental material, videos, and demo applications to some chapters. Most of the applications include the full source code, which makes it easy to experiment with the techniques presented in the book. Note that most of the applications run on Windows only and many of them require a shader model 3.0 graphics card.

I highly recommend this book to any professional working as graphics or game developer. It is a valuable addition to my library of graphics books and I will come back to a number of articles in the near future. The focus on GPGPU in the second half of the book is a welcome addition and we can expect to see more and more non-graphics-related applications make use of the processing power in today's GPUs.

Truly 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. It is not a "how-to" book on shading or GPUs or even advanced graphics. There are equations and code interspersed throughout the book, with bits of wisdom that are very instructive for the initiated. However, if you are a home-grown graphics programmer who knows C, or C++, or Java, and even some assembly language, plus you are familiar with image processing and computer graphics techniques, that will probably not be enough to get you through this book. I would say that this is a five star book for high-level professional graphics programmers who work with GPU specifics and shaders daily, and I would say it is a two or three star book for everyone else.
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. That section has a series of articles that comprise an excellent tutorial on GPU's, what they are, and what they can do. It is the best material in print I have seen on the subject.
If you want a good introduction into the concept of writing shaders plus practice with an actual shading language, try "OpenGL Shading Language, 2nd Edition" by Rost, assuming you already know OpenGL. For a great on-line resource for modeling and graphics that will get you going in the right direction of knowing what the authors of these articles know, type "Elias Hugo" into Google and check out the first address shown. There is a wealth of on-line articles, complete with math and pseudocode, available there. Then, maybe, you will be ready to sift some knowledge from this "GPU Gems" series.
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