I set out to write this post right after I finished the book (approximately a month ago), but it seemed that I had a little problem keeping up with a good habit of blogging consistently. Anyway the book I am talking about is The Cg Tutorial: The Definitive Guide to Programmable Real-Time Graphics from NVIDIA.
I became obsessed with hardware-accelerated real-time rendering when GT showed me the beauty and the power of Cg language while I was taking the computer graphics course. As I decided to implement the rendering of some fogged terrain using Cg for my term project, I got this Cg tutorial and had it with me wherever I went for some time. To be honest, the project did not benefit much from this book since the techniques adopted were quite simple and fundamental – barely enough for me to have a taste of its awesomeness. However, what I like about the book is its readability. For beginners like me, the adequate introduction and well explained examples are very easy to comprehend (although an advanced user might find it naive and too verbose on obvious stuff). I finished Chapter 2 through Chapter 9 half a year ago and did not pick up the rest chapters (1 and 10) until recently (I have my reasons).
At first I did have some complaints about the fact that book did not include a basic yet important tutorial on how to connect the Cg programs with the C/C++ programs. They were gone by the time I reached Appendix B, which was exactly what I was looking for. Thus in my opinion, if you are into harnessing the power of the GPU for real-time rendering and are looking for a place to start, this book is definitely worth your attention. Plus, NVIDIA just made it available online and it is free!
Because I was so into graphics by then, I also got myself a brand new GPU Gems 3. Unfortunately, it was for more advanced CG (computer graphics) practitioners and I don’t have any clue about some code snippets (as in what kind of language is this or what is this file format). If somebody has got experience with this book, I would really appreciate it if he/she can share the knowledge.
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