A big thing in modern graphics is shaders, and the orange book covers Glsl. Cg is also great.
I Would check out the Cg tutorial (that's the name of the book) on nvidias website and also download the toolkit.
Also get OpenGL sdk 10 on their site. you should be able to use most of those. If your up for a great challenge check out geometry shaders. Also d3d 10 is the old new, d3d 11 and tesselation is the new coolness.

EDIT: Was using my iphone, made the corrections haha.

[Edited by - AverageJoeSSU on August 17, 2009 1:04:36 AM]

Quote:Original post by cache_hit
Appreciate all the suggestions. I might pick up a copy of RTR, it looks like it fits the bill. It's a shame there's no exercise, I always have a subtle distaste for technical books that provide no exercises. With a book containing a carefully crafted set of exercises, you can literally be an expert on the subject by the time you finish the book, although it might take you a year as opposed to a month to finish the book. But it looks good anyway.

Is the material in ShaderX and ShaderX2 outdated, or is much of it still relevant? I suppose the same question applies for GPU Gems.


And am I to understand that once Direct3D 11 goes RTM, Direct3D 10 will be completely obsolete? In the sense that you could take a program written for D3D10, #define all the functions, interfaces, and structures to contain the number 10 instead of the number 11, and it would behave identically? Does this require Direct3D 11 compatible hardware, or is it safe to code only for the Direct3D 11 interface and as long as you don't use any features that are new in D3D 11, it will work on all D3D-10 compatible hardware?

No, that's not quite right. There are some functional level changes that alter the way you do things (like using a rendering context now instead of only a device). However, you can run on the D3D10 hardware via the D3D11 runtime - essentially letting you use the D3D11 API to target all of the previous level hardware down to D3D9. Even so, using D3D11 is still pretty close to D3D10 if you aren't doing multithreaded work, so whatever you learn in 10 is probably applicable 11.