Direct3D ShaderX: Vertex and Pixel Shader Tips and Tricks with CDROM

Vertex and pixel shader programming allows graphics and game developers to create photorealistic graphics on the personal computer for the first time. And with DirectX, programmers have access to an assembly language interface to the transformation and lighting hardware (vertex shaders) and the pixel pipeline (pixel shaders). Direct3D ShaderX begins with an introduction to vertex and pixel shader programming and moves on to a wide array of specialized shader tricks contributed by 27 experts in game and graphics programming. These range from character animation and lighting to photorealistic faces and non-photorealistic rendering. Special effects shaders are also presented, including those for such effects as bubbles, rippling water, animated grass, and particle flows.

User review
old but still relevant
The best part of the book is the article by Dean Calver on vertex compression. Most of the other material are good practial tricks on shaders plus tutorials. Dean's article not only gives a clever way to compress and decompress vertex position - by concating the model view matrix with his decompression matrix. His use of eigen vectors to find the principal axis is refreshing. He also showed us how to extend the method to handle geometry that are larger and cannot be handled within the precision of the basic method.

User review
This book is great for starters and pros!
Shaders are the direction of real time graphics programming for games and other applications. They were introduced in their first versions with DX8 hardware like the GeForce3 and the Radeon 8500 and are continouisly extended in further version of hardware and software like in the new DX9 class of hardware.
It is industry wide consensus that shaders are the way to get cool graphics in realtime games. But there has always been a lack of good documentation about what shaders are and their possibilities. This book was made to address it. It is designed to handle the DX8 API way of shaders together with lots of DX8 samples but the principles apply to OpenGL shader programming also.

The book is splittet into two parts.

The first part is a thorough introduction about vertex and pixel shaders written by editor Wolfgang Engel. It explains the reasoning behind the shaders, the definitions of the virtual machines, and all assembler commands available. For each type of shaders there is also an introductionary example section for getting first successful shader programs running. It is well written with lots of information.

The second part is a collection of shader gems - short articles by differenct authors. Among the authors are people from developer relations from nVidia, Matrox and ATI as well as graphics programmers from inside the gaming industry. These authors have lots of experience programming shaders and they show in short sections what's possible and how to get there.

This book is standing in my bookshelf and in the bookshelves of a lot of professional developers worldwide.

I highly recommend buying it.

User review
Very poorly organized
This is a very poorly put together book. It's organized as a series of small articles, but the article sizes vary widely and many of them contradict others. ,,.
It definately has some useful information in there, but it's tough to extract through the poor organization and formatting.

User review
An excellent compilation of useful shaders
I found this book to be an excellent reference for state-of-the-art vertex and pixel shaders. It's well organized, and contains many useful solutions for game developers.

User review
Shader Programming is the Future
If you want to start shader programming or if you have still some experience in shader programming this book is for you.
The stuff presented here is absolutely cutting-edge. I can't understand other reviewers, who complain about the usage of ps.1.4. All the upcoming graphics cards will support ps.1.4, so it is good to get some of the examples in ps.1.4.
I heard that the first print of this book was sold out after one week ,,. I know why !