Real-Time Rendering Portal

Last changed: November 21, 2009

This page is devoted to sites we use on a continuing basis. They're personal picks, and reflect our own biases.

  1. Blogmania - track and read, with say Google Reader (setup info): Our own, GameDevKicks, Humus News, Lost in the Triangles, TomF's Tech Blog, realtimecollisiondetection.net, C0DE517E, Gates 381, Beautiful Pixels, Pixel, Too Many..., I Get Your Fail (brilliant), ramblin' man, Level of Detail, Diary of a Graphics Programmer, Chris Hecker's, meshula.net, Deano's Home From Home, NVIDIA Developer Zone, Pete Shirley's Graphics Blog, Pandemonium, Legalize Adulthood!, Beyond3D, Gamasutra Feature Articles, John Ratcliff's Code Suppository, Industrial Arithmetic, DirectX, Meshlab, and GameDev.net. You'll find yet more blogs linked from these pages.
  2. NVIDIA and AMD (ATI) developer sites - demos, code samples, white papers, etc. For just the cool demos: NVIDIA, AMD/ATI. Other worthwhile code samples at Humus-3D.
  3. Ke-Sen Huang's resources page has links for papers from all the major computer graphics conferences and workshops. ACM publications have been removed; see the Internet Archive for pages for publications from 2007 and earlier. Frédo Durand's page has links to researchers, labs, publications, and more.
  4. Developer sites and mailing lists: GD Algorithms archives (subscribe), GameDev.net is active, as is OpenGL.org, Ogre Forums, DevMaster.net less so, and FlipCode (closed, but good archives).
  5. Free (and good) books online:
  6. Google Books includes extensive samples from many books, including:
  7. IntroGameDev and AI Wisdom are excellent guides to articles in Gamasutra, Game Developer, and all the major book series (GPU Gems, Game Programming Gems, and ShaderX). IntroGameDev is more comprehensive, but AI Wisdom includes abstracts and other information. The list of all Game Programming Gems is also handy.
  8. Paper Search:
  9. Google Groups:
  10. comp.graphics.algorithms FAQ - not maintained, but still full of computational goodness.
  11. Gamasutra's programming page - all sorts of information floats by here.
  12. Geometric Tools - there are many different code snippets and tutorials here to do all sorts of graphics operations, with a focus on computational geometry and intersection methods.
  13. Graphics Gems Repository - contains the source code for many graphics algorithms. Search the contents by category, by author, or by book.
  14. Virtual Terrain Project - a constantly-expanding repository of algorithms about and models of terrain, vegetation, natural phenomena, etc.
  15. Sourceforge (Graphics - note project tree) is the best place to browse for free, open-source software applications.
  16. journal of graphics tools - a small but useful repository, as many of the articles have code associated with them, freely available for download.
  17. 3D Object Intersection Page - where to find articles and code on this topic.
  18. GPGPU.org - all about using the GPU for general purpose computation, the site also has useful info about GPU programming in general in their FAQ, wiki, and throughout the site.
  19. Eric Weisstein's World of Mathematics is an incredible (though often dense) resource for mathematical definitions.
  20. Steam's hardware survey tracks what is currently used by their subscribers. Unity's survey is focussed more on casual gamers' machines.
  21. Tech Power Up has an up-to-date summary of the clock speed, memory size, and other characteristics for every major consumer PC GPU. Tech ARP has similar GPU charts for workstations, PCs, and mobiles. Hardware Info has an amazing GPU comparison app. Notebookcheck also compares mobile GPUs, with text reviews.
  22. GPU Review Sites - these sites often have in-depth analysis of GPU features:
  23. Game Developer source code archive - handy for demo code. Also, the GDC Proceedings archive is quite old (circa 2003) but has a large number of presentations.
  24. ACM TOG software and literature links pages - links to source code, papers, tutorials, etc. The 3D model section is particularly useful.
  25. Game Related - Metacritic or GameRankings.com for meta-ratings, VG Chartz for console and handheld sales figures, gamedevmap for developer locations.
Special bonus site: you need to visit it only once, but Maxima is worth listing here. It is a free version of Macsyma (which is similar to Mathematica and Maple). If you work with equations and do not have $1500 to spare, you need this.

If you know a site that you're simply shocked we don't list here, please let me know.