Ray Tracing Gems (Series)
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Description
Ray Tracing Gems is a two-volume open-access book series edited by Eric Haines, Tomas Akenine-Moller, Adam Marrs, Peter Shirley, and Ingo Wald, hosted at realtimerendering.com/raytracinggems. Both volumes are free to download under Creative Commons licenses with supplementary code on GitHub.
Volume 1 (2019) covers DXR introduction, hybrid rendering, denoising, ambient occlusion, reflections, shadows, path reuse, and production integration patterns from NVIDIA, Unity, EA, and research labs. Volume 2 (2021) expands into advanced intersection, texture filtering for ray cones, translucency, motion blur, spectral effects, and multi-GPU scaling.
Articles assume familiarity with basic ray tracing and focus on practitioner techniques too advanced for introductory texts but not always covered in papers. Errata-corrected unofficial PDFs and per-chapter HTML are linked from the site alongside print editions from Apress.
The series follows the GPU Gems anthology model for the DXR era. Editors also maintain the Real-Time Rendering resources portal and related ray tracing bibliographies.
Widely regarded as the essential free reference for real-time ray tracing on DXR, Vulkan RT, and OptiX; frequently recommended immediately after foundational path tracing texts when moving to hybrid production renderers.