GPU Zen 4 : Advanced Rendering Techniques

by Wolfgang Engel, Laura Reznikov, Kirill Bazhenov

Exploring recent developments in the rapidly evolving field of game real-time rendering, GPU Zen assembles a high-quality collection of cutting-edge contributions for programming the GPU.

I General Rendering
Nicolas Lopez and Victor Blanco Ruiz, Editors

1. Visibility Buffer and Deferred Rendering in The Dark Ages
Dominik Lazarek, Philip Hammer, and Jean Geffroy

2. Volumetric Clouds and Atmosphere in The Dark Ages
Yixin Wang

3. Animating Trees in Assassin’s Creed Shadows
Maxime Beaudoin and Jade Marcoux-Ouellet

4. Remote Particle Editor
Nicola Palomba and Wolfgang Engel


II Ray Tracing
Laura Reznikov and Edie Comas, Editors

5. Ray Tracing the World of Assassin’s Creed Shadows
William Bussière, Luc Leblanc, Eric Charpenay, and Melino Conte

6. Ray Tracing Thousands of Lights for Direct Illumination in Snowdrop
Quentin Kuenlin, Gauthier Viau, and Paula Jukarainen

7. ReSTIR-Based Path Tracing in Unreal Engine 5
Jiayin Cao and Daqi Lin

8. Hash-Based Hierarchical Radiance Binning
Youssef Abusamra and Andrei Bazzaev


III Tools of the Trade
Kirill Bazhenov, Editor

9. Real-Time Neural Network Implementation for GPUs
Jakub Bokšanský

10. Practical Unbounded Hash-Grid Encoding for Neural Radiance Caching
Atsushi Yoshimura, Sho Ikeda, and Takahiro Harada

11. Continuous Streaming Systems in Game Architectures for Real-
Time Asset Management
Jonathan Haberl

12. Comprehensive Neural Materials
Zilin Xu, Xiang Chen, Beibei Wang, Lu Wang, Zahra Montazeri,
and Ling-Qi Yan

366 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 20, 2026