Book excerpt: 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. Rendering (Patrick Cozzi)1. Adaptive GPU Tessellation with Compute Shaders by Jad Khoury, Jonathan Dupuy, and Christophe Riccio2. Applying Vectorized Visibility on All frequency Direct Illumination by Ho Chun Leung, Tze Yui Ho, Zhenni Wang, Chi Sing Leung, Eric Wing Ming Wong3. Non-periodic Tiling of Noise-based Procedural Textures by Aleksandr Kirillov4. Rendering Surgery Simulation with Vulkan by Nicholas Milef, Di Qi, and Suvranu De5. Skinned Decals by Hawar DoghramachiEnvironmental Effects (Wolfgang Engel)1. Real-Time Fluid Simulation in Shadow of the Tomb Raider by Peter Sikachev, Martin Palko and Alexandre Chekroun2. Real-time Snow Deformation in Horizon Zero Dawn: The Frozen Wilds by Kevin ÖrtegrenShadows (Maurizio Vives)1. Soft Shadow Approximation for Dappled Light Sources by Mariano Merchante2. Parallax-Corrected Cached Shadow Maps by Pavlo Turchyn3D Engine Design (Wessam Bahnassi)1. Real-Time Layered Materials Compositing Using Spatial Clustering Encoding by Sergey Makeev2. Procedural Stochastic Textures by Tiling and Blending by Thomas Deliot and Eric Heitz3. A Ray Casting Technique for Baked Texture Generation by Alain Galvan and Jeff Russell4. Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer by Arseny Kapoulkine5. glTF - Runtime 3D Asset Delivery by Marco HutterRay Tracing (Anton Kaplanyan)1. Real-Time Ray-Traced One-Bounce Caustics by Holger Gruen2. Adaptive Anti-Aliasing using Conservative Rasterization and GPU Ray Tracing by Rahul Sathe, Holger Gruen, Adam Marrs, Josef Spjut, Morgan McGuire, Yury Uralsky