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Ray Tracing Gems II Available Today as Free Digital Download

Ray Tracing Games II is now available to download for free via Apress and Amazon. This Open Access book is a must-have for anyone interested in real-time rendering. Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games.

Ray Tracing Games II is now available to download for free via Apress.

This Open Access book is a must-have for anyone interested in real-time rendering. Ray tracing is the holy grail of gaming graphics, simulating the physical behavior of light to bring real-time, cinematic-quality rendering to even the most visually intense games. Ray tracing is also a fundamental algorithm used for architecture applications, visualization, sound simulation, deep learning, and more.

To win a limited edition print copy of Ray Tracing Gems II, enter the giveaway contest here: https://developer.nvidia.com/ray-tracing-gems-ii

A message from the editors:

In 2018, real-time ray tracing arrived in consumer GPU hardware and swiftly established itself as a key component of how images would be generated moving forward. Now, three years later, the second iteration of this hardware is available, mainstream game consoles support ray tracing, and cross-platform API standards have been established to drive even wider adoption. Developers and researchers have been busy inventing (and reinventing) algorithms to take advantage of the new possibilities created by these advancements. The “gems” of knowledge discovered during this process are what you will find in Ray Tracing Gems II.

Before diving into the treasure trove, we want to make sure you know the following:

Open access content allows you to freely copy and redistribute any chapter, or the whole book, as long as you give appropriate credit and you are not using it for commercial purposes. The specific license is the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND). We put this in place so that authors, and everyone else, can disseminate the information in this volume as quickly, widely, and equitably as possible.

Writing an anthology style book, such as this, is an act of collective faith. Faith that the authors, editors, publisher, and schedules all converge to produce a worthwhile result for readers. Under normal circumstances this is a difficult task, but the past year and a half has been anything but “normal”. This book’s call for participation was posted in late November 2019, just as the COVID-19 virus began to emerge in Asia. In the 18 months since, a once-in-a-century pandemic has surged. Its impact has touched every person on Earth – and it is not yet over. The virus has taken lives, battered livelihoods, and broken the way of life as we knew it. We postponed this book with the quiet conviction that the coronavirus would be overcome. As time passed, the development of vaccines made breakneck progress, remote work in quarantine became a new staple of life, and authors began to write about computer graphics again. As a result, this book was written entirely during quarantine. We sincerely thank the authors for their passion and dedication – and faith – all of which made this book possible under extraordinary circumstances.

     – Adam Marrs, Peter Shirley, and Ingo Wald

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