It’s here! Today I had a copy of GPU Gems 2 in my hand, newly back from the printer. Like new cars, freshly-printed books have that Special Sellable Smell all their own. Sweet. You’ll find a teensy print of this photo inside the front section, as I’ve reprised my section-editor role from the previous edition — though this time I’ve stepped back to let other people write more of the book content proper.
My section, titled simply “High Quality Rendering” covers innovative uses of GPUs in image processing for movies like SpiderMan; in high-end compositing programs like Apple Motion and rendering programs like Gelato; and a handful of other push-the-envelope imaging methods aimed at getting the best quality images possible from a high-speed GPU pipeline. You can get a glimpse of them by checking out the Visual Table of Contents that’s printed inside the book’s front cover. We think this new edition is even better than the first best seller.
You can order Gems 2 from Amazon or just show up at the Moscone Center for the Game Developers Conference 2005 where there are sure to be copies on-hand and on sale. Last year’s conference booksellers sold as many copies of Gems 1 as the printer could ship!