NVIDIA’s done it again, they’re releasing GPU Gems 3 to the web. It’s being done in the installment plan, I expect so that there’s something to announce every few weeks, which is fine. Eventually the whole book will be available, so much better to have this “section a month” scheme than not at all. NVIDIA’s to be complimented on their progressive attitude. GPU Gems 3 is less than a year and a half old, so could still make a few dollars, but NVIDIA’s goal is to get the information out there.
This summer Wolfgang Engel and I tracked down authors of the ShaderX and ShaderX^2 books and secured releases. The ShaderX^2 books quickly found a home at gamedev.net, but Wolfgang had to dig around for the PDF for the first ShaderX book, then find a place to host it, plus the dog ate my homework, etc. Long and short, the original ShaderX book is now free for download here: http://tog.acm.org/resources/shaderx/ - I decided to host it on the ACM TOG site, as it’s a valuable resource, despite its hoary old age. Just ignore the first chunk about using 1.x shaders and enjoy the rest.
I do wish the GPU Gems books were available as PDFs (hint, hint, NVIDIA), as they would be much easier to search for those “I know I saw this in one of these books” moments.
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Even if you haven’t bought the book yet, you may still want a printed copy even with free online access. I know I prefer the printed book to thumb through (at least when I am not traveling), and now I can copy and paste the code from the web site when I need it. I suspect you won’t see a PDF release to prevent illegal book printing and sales. (The publisher would not like that.) And the episodic release is a great idea for NVIDIA: it gets attention and traffic to their developer site a bunch of times, instead of just once. Kudos to NVIDIA for doing this!
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