I just wanted to congratulate the authors on the new edition. I’m getting back into 3d rendering, and this book is my go-to resource for everything Metal.
At first glance, it looks like the order of the topics was overhauled. Definitely an improvement. Are there any other major changes worth mentioning for readers of the previous editions?
Thank you 
. I’m really glad you find it useful.
Most of the book was overhauled, including the architecture of the more advanced projects.
Major changes:
There were a number of forum questions about vertex processing, so there are two new chapters on shaders:- one for the vertex function, focussing on vertex processing, and one for the fragment function, focussing on normals, depth and various Metal standard library functions.
The topic of render passes was expanded from one chapter to four chapters, with new sections on tile-based deferred rendering, point light volumes and stencils. The shadows chapter has more visualization of problems. It doesn’t go as far as cascaded shadow maps, but hopefully, it will open the possibility of further research for readers.
The scene creation chapter, which used to concentrate on a node hierarchy, no longer has that. Instead it discusses input and cameras.
Compute is introduced much earlier, with a small GPU function that processes vertices.
Topics are rearranged more logically, moving the more advanced topics of animation and GPU-driven rendering to the end of the rasterizing sections.
To accommodate these changes, we had to lose some chapters. The procedural generation chapter from version 2, wasn’t really a Metal topic. And we removed the outdated ray tracing API and SpriteKit integration chapters. If you have a subscription (and possibly if you own the pdf?), you can still access the old pdf versions.
@caroline Thanks for the reply.
All these changes make a lot of sense and improve the book’s focus on graphics programming. Moving advanced topics (tessellation, for example) to the back is also a good choice. I’m looking forward to re-reading.
Loving the new topics. Thanks for all the work!