The era of real-time ray tracing has finally arrived. This book’s 32 well-written chapters, organized into seven parts, explain the shared techniques and tricks that make real-time ray tracing possible on current technologies. These technologies include accessible application programming interfaces (APIs) like DirectX Raytracing (DXR) and support from motherboards with graphics processing units (GPUs) that include dedicated ray tracing cores supplementing traditional rasterization-focused cores.

Although the title of Part 1 of this book is “Ray Tracing Basics,” its intended audience is experienced graphics programmers, not beginners. As the authors say: “Like other ‘gems’ books, it focuses on subjects commonly considered too advanced for introductory texts yet rarely addressed by research papers.”

The electronic version can be shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, and the book is freely available online (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-4427-2). Therefore this review does not describe the detailed contents, but instead highlights important aspects.

The foreword describes how ray tracing is simple, parallel, elegant, and accessible. It also clearly explains how the workarounds used in the past, so a scene element could “tell what is around it,” provided only limited and diminishing results. Finally, it summarizes the state of applicable hardware and software as of December 2018. It is well worth reading.

Pages xxi–xli contain photos and biographies of the 65 contributors. Readers are introduced not only to the individuals who contributed and continue to contribute to ray tracing, but also the companies and academic institutions that advanced ray tracing and other aspects of computer graphics and interactive techniques, and continue to do so today. It is excellent reading for anyone wanting a career in computer graphics.

Each of the seven parts begins with an introduction to the part’s chapters by the part’s editor. These introductions describe why the chapter is important and outline its key elements, such as pseudocode snippets, detailed mathematical derivations, ray-traced graphics from specific implementations, and comparisons among multiple implementations.

This is a beautiful book, and having a hard copy in your library is well worth the price. I am looking forward to the expected release of Ray tracing gems II in March 2021.