Graphics Programming Resources Hub

A comprehensive collection of graphics programming resources covering everything from beginner tutorials to advanced ray tracing techniques, organized by topic and difficulty level.

This page contains a collection of graphics programming and adjacent resources curated by our meetup attendees.

New to graphics programming and don't know where to start? Check our curated beginner friendly resources. Want to add a resource? See guide for adding resources.

Beginner Friendly Resources

Learn OpenGL

Learn OpenGL is the definitive resource for learning real-time renderer techniques as beginners. Even though it is an OpenGL tutorial, it also teaches rendering techniques at the same time.

Beginner Friendly | OpenGL Overview | Tutorial | C++ | GLSL

Ray Tracing in One Weekend series

Series of online books teaching the basics of path tracing

CMU's introductory to Computer Graphics (2020)

A comprehensive introduction to various topics in computer graphics

Tinyrenderer: Software rendering in 500 lines of bare C++

Writing a software rasterization from scratch to demonstrate how graphics APIs work.

Beginner Friendly | Rasterization/Software Rasterization | Tutorial | C++

The Graphics Codex

Free book that contains chapters on physically-based shading and rendering, coding projects, and reference pages.

Overview | Book | C++

Math For Game Devs (2020)

Four part lecture on essential math for game developers by Freya Holmér

Beginner Friendly | Math/Gamedev | Video | Assignments

3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development

The book focus on cover fundamental 3D math concepts for beginners

Beginner Friendly | Math/Gamedev | Book

The Ray Tracer Challenge

This book challenges you to build a Whitted-style ray tracer from scratch. Unlike many tutorials, it doesn't provide code and follows a unique test-first approach, describing only test specifications and algorithms.

Paid | Beginner Friendly | Ray Tracing/Whitted | Book

Intermediate to Advanced Resources

Dartmouth CS87 Rendering Algorithms

The course nicely fills the gap between a Ray Tracing in One Weekend style toy renderer and a more general and fully-fledged renderer that PBRT describes

Course | Ray Tracing/Overview | Assignments | Slides | C++

Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation

Comprehensive reference on physically based rendering techniques

Ray Tracing/Overview | PBR/Light Transport | Randomness/Monte Carlo | Book | C++

UPenn CIS 5650 GPU Programming and Architecture (2025)

A course that introduce GPU parallel programming with a Computer Graphics flavor

Vulkan Specification

It is a good idea to keep it open while doing Vulkan programming

Vulkan Specification

How to build a BVH Series

A blog post series delving into building a BVH from scratch

Ray Tracing/Acceleration Structures | Article | C++

Best Practices for Modern OpenGL

A guide about avoiding common programmer errors by using modern OpenGL (4.5+)

OpenGL | Article

VkGuide by Victor Blanco

The goal of this guide is to understand Vulkan correctly, and act as a stepping stone for then working in your own projects.

Vulkan/Tutorials | Tutorial | C++

7.3 Bounding Volume Hierarchies | Physically Based Rendering

PBRT book chapter on how to build a BVH

Ray Tracing/Acceleration Structures | Article | C++

Lecture 18: Monte Carlo Rendering (CMU 15-462/662)

An introduction to Monte Carlo ray tracing

Randomness/Monte Carlo | Ray Tracing/Path Tracing | Video

Drawing Lines is Hard

Summarizes the problem of GPU line primitives and explores a few different techniques for 2D and 3D triangulated line rendering, and accompany each with a small canvas demo.

Graphics Effects/Line/Triangulated Line | Article | GLSL

Game Programming Patterns

A free online book covering design patterns commonly used in game development

Gamedev/Overview | Book

Learn wgpu

A tutorial for the WebGPU API using Rust and the wgpu library

WebGPU/Tutorial | Tutorial | Rust

WGSL

WebGPU/Tutorial | Tutorial | GLSL | Javascript

The rendering equation

The classic Kajiya rendering equation paper introduced the "rendering equation" and the path tracing algorithm

Ray Tracing/Path Tracing | PBR/Light Transport | Randomness/Monte Carlo | Paper | Classic

TU Wien: Vulkan Lecture Series (2021)

Lecture series on Vulkan programming from TU Wien

Course | Vulkan/Tutorials | Video | Slides | C++

WebGL2 Fundamentals

An introduction to 2D and 3D computer graphics using WebGL2

WebGL | Tutorial | GLSL | Javascript

WebGPU Fundamentals

A series of lessons or tutorials about webgpu

WebGPU/Tutorial | Tutorial | GLSL | Javascript

An Improved Illumination Model for Shaded Display

This is Turner Whitted's original Ray Tracing paper

Ray Tracing/Whitted | Paper | Classic

Lecture 19: Variance Reduction (CMU 15-462/662)

An overview various variance reduction techniques for Monte Carlo rendering, covering bidirectional path tracing, Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, MIS, stratified Sampling, low-discrepancy sampling, blue noise, photon mapping, and finite element radiosity

Randomness/Variance Reduction | Randomness/Monte Carlo | Ray Tracing | Video

Instanced Line Rendering Part I

Builds on the foundation from "Drawing Lines is Hard" and uses instance rendering to draw lines

Graphics Effects/Line/Triangulated Line | Article | GLSL | JavaScript

A Survey on Bounding Volume Hierarchies for Ray Tracing

Excellent overview paper on BVH

Ray Tracing/Acceleration Structures | Paper

Compute Shader Glossary

A glossary of terms used in compute shader programming. Provides cross-API comparisons

Game Loop - Game Programming Patterns

Chapter from Game Programming Patterns explaining different design decisions for a game loop

Gamedev/Game Loop | Physical Simulation/Stability | Article

Instanced Line Rendering Part II: Alpha blending

Continues instanced line rendering, introducing alpha-blending for triangulated lines.

Graphics Effects/Line/Triangulated Line | Article | GLSL | JavaScript

Implementing a tiny CPU rasterizer

Blog post series on implementing a CPU rasterizer from scratch

Rasterization/Software Rasterization | Tutorial | C++

Tone Mapping

Introduces the theory of tone mapping and discusses commonly used tone mapping operators

Color/Tone Mapping | Article

Robust Monte Carlo Methods for Light Transport Simulation

the Academy Award-winning Ph.D. thesis by Eric Veach. It starts from bidirectional light transport algorithms and introduces multiple importance sampling and Metropolis light transport

vk_mini_path_tracer

A relatively small, beginner-friendly path tracing tutorial using Vulkan's ray tracing API

Vulkan/Ray Tracing | Ray Tracing/API | Tutorial | C++ | GLSL

Advanced Global Illumination

An advanced book focused on light transport theory for global illumination.

PBR/Light Transport | Book

Edge-Avoiding À-Trous Wavelet Transform for fast Global Illumination Filtering (2010)

Classic paper introducing a fast and simple filter for ray tracing denoising.

Randomness/Denoising | Ray Tracing | Paper | Classic

Barycentric Coordinates

An interactive introduction to barycentric coordinates. It starts with linear-interpolation and generalize it to triangles and higher-dimensions.

Math/Gamedev | Article

Rendering Resources | Benedikt Bitterli

Scenes in Tungsten, Mitsuba, and pbrt-v4 formats

Assets/Models | Assets/Scenes | List

Algorithms for Modern Hardware

Free online book focusing on high-performance computing on CPU

System Programming/Performance | Book

Better Code: Concurrency - Sean Parent

This talk uses the primitives supplied by C++14 to build a simple task system. It discussing the issues with usage of mutexes for shared data and introducing concurrent queues and thread pools

System Programming/CPU Concurrency | Video | C++

Adventures in Hybrid Rendering (2021)

A blog post on implementing a hybrid ray tracing rendering pipeline

Ray Tracing/Hybrid Rendering | Article

Lecture 10: Meshes and Manifolds (CMU 15-462/662)

Great overview, and also spend significant time on the half-edge data structure

Geometry/Data Structures | Video

Depth Precision Visualized

A visual explanation of floating-point depth buffer precision, and introduces nonlinear depth mapping

Numerics/Depth | Numerics/Floating Point | Article

What is direct lighting (next event estimation) in a ray tracer?

An explanation of direct lighting and next event estimation in ray tracers

Ray Tracing/Next Event Estimation | Randomness/Variance Reduction/Importance Sampling | Article

Data-Oriented Design

This book is a fabulous read to get a deeper understanding of what data-oriented design is about. It goes beyond the often-mentioned cache misses, SOA, ECS, or anti-OOP rants.

System Programming/Data-Oriented Design | Book

Arseny Kapoulkine: Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer (2020)

Best practices for writing a high-performance Vulkan renderer

Vulkan/Best Practices | Performance/API Usage | Article

5 ways to draw an outline

Discussed 5 techniques for rendering an outline around an object

Graphics Effects/Line/Outline | Article

Fix Your Timestep! (2004)

Classic article on implementing a fixed timestep game loop for stable physics simulation.

Gamedev/Game Loop | Physical Simulation/Stability | Article

Gimbal lock confusion

A stackoverflow answer on why the Gimbal lock occurs

Math/Gamedev | Math/Rotation | Article

Graphics Pipelines for Young Bloods

Describes forward/defered shading techniques and various tradeoffs

Rasterization/Shading Techniques | Article

High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs (2011)

A paper describing high-performance software rasterization techniques running on GPUs.

Rasterization/Software Rasterization | GPU Compute/Applications | Paper

Sascha Willems's How to Vulkan in 2026

A minimalist tutorial from Sascha Willems on how to use the Vulkan graphics API in 2026. The idea is to get people started with rasterization in Vulkan using commonly supported features to make the API easier to use.

Vulkan/Tutorials | Tutorial | C++

Experiments in Hybrid Raytraced Shadows

Explores combining rasterization and ray tracing for shadow rendering

Ray Tracing/Hybrid Rendering | Graphics Effects/Shadows/Raytraced | Article

Immersive Linear Algebra

Free online linear algebra book with fully interactive figures

Math/Linear Algebra | Book

John Chapman SSAO Tutorial (2013)

A tutorial on implementing SSAO

Graphics Effects/Ambient Occlusion/SSAO | Article

Learn OpenGL guest article: Cascaded Shadow Mapping

Learn OpenGL guest article on cascaded shadow mapping, which resolves the resolution issues of the naive shadow mapping

Graphics Effects/Shadows/Shadow Mapping | Article

GLSL Megakernels Considered Harmful: Wavefront Path Tracing on GPUs (2013)

Introduced wavefront path tracing

Ray Tracing/GPU | Paper | Classic

Memory allocation strategies article series

A series of articles talking about custom memory allocators, starting from the simple arena allocators, to more complicated ones like the stack allocators, pool allocators, free list allocators, and finally buddy allocators.

System Programming/Memory Management | Article

NVIDIA Vulkan Ray Tracing Tutorials

This repository provides a comprehensive learning resource for Vulkan ray tracing, featuring a progressive step-by-step tutorial that transforms a rasterization application into a fully functional ray tracing implementation

Vulkan/Ray Tracing | Ray Tracing/API | Tutorial | C++

Parallel Prefix Sum (Scan) with CUDA (2007)

A classic reference on implementing a work-efficient parallel prefix sum algorithms

CUDA | GPU Compute/Parallel Algorithms | Paper | Classic

Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows

NVIDIA paper introducing Percentage-Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), based on shadow mapping and percentage‐closer filtering (PCF)

Graphics Effects/Shadows/Shadow Mapping | Paper

The Book of Shaders

The author introduces shaders from an artistic perspective, and the book covers many topics that more engineering-focused resources such as "Learn OpenGL" won't cover.

Beginner Friendly | Shader Art | Book

TinyBVH

Single-header zero-dependency BVH construction and traversal library

Ray Tracing/Acceleration Structures | Tools | Repository | C++

Visualizing quaternions by 3blue1brown

A great intereactive introduction/refresher for quaternions. It focuses on intuition rather than mathematical definitions

Math/Rotation | Math/Quaternions | Article | Video

VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering tutorial

This tutorial shows how to use the VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension in Vulkan. It shows the steps required to load the extension, use it, and how it affects related components such as pipeline creation

Vulkan/Dynamic Rendering | Article | C++

3D Graphics Rendering Cookbook

A book that covers and compares both the OpenGL and Vulkan APIs, while also covering various recipes about making a renderer.

Paid | Vulkan/Tutorials | OpenGL | Book | C++

Foundations of Game Engine Development, Volume 1: Mathematics 1st Edition

Introduces math routines with implementations. It also touches Grassman algebra

Paid | Math/Gamedev | Math/Geometric Algebra | Book

Mathematics for Computer Graphics

comprehensive range of mathematical techniques and problem-solving strategies associated with computer graphics

Paid | Math/Gamedev | Book

#Graphics #OpenGL #Vulkan #Ray Tracing #Game Development