In 2018, with the release of NVIDIA’s RTX series GPUs, real-time ray tracing finally became accessible to game developers, content creators, and consumers. It is a technology that will forever change graphics processing.

To help developers navigate this new technology, a wide-ranging book on the topic is being published early this year: Ray Tracing Gems.

We have some great news: Readers of NVIDIA’s Dev News Center get early access to the text, at no cost! NVIDIA will be distributing the book for free in its entirety, as a series of seven PDFs. Every few days, a new section of the book will be made available.

Ray Tracing Gems is the work of more than 60 contributors, all experts in the field of ray tracing. Their articles cover techniques that are not often discussed in general texts, but are important for high quality results.

You can find the first installment and future segments on the NVIDIA Developer Zone.

Here is an excerpt from Ray Tracing Gems’ Forward, written by Turner Whitted, the “father” of ray tracing:

“The introduc­tion of explicit ray tracing acceleration features into graphics hardware is a major step toward bringing real-time ray tracing into common usage. Combining the sim­plicity and inherent parallelism of ray tracing with the accessibility and horsepower of modern GPUs brings real-time ray tracing performance within the reach of every graphics programmer. However, getting a driver‘s license isn‘t the same as winning an automobile race. There are techniques to be learned. There is experience to be shared. As with any discipline, there are tricks of the trade. When those tricks and techniques are shared by the experts who have contributed to this text, they truly become gems.”