Last week at work a junior colleague asked me where do I get the presentations I’ve been reading from. This made me realise that, understandably, it might not be so obvious and common knowledge for people just starting graphics programming so I compiled a list of online resources I am frequently using to study the state of the art in Rendering.
- Siggraph’s Advances in Realtime Rendering is a invaluable resource for cutting edge rendering techniques
- Same with Open Problems in real time rendering course, although unfortunately it did not run this year
- The Rendering Engine Architecture Siggraph course includes presentations on modern rendering architecture techniques
- @self_shadow has been collecting Siggraph courses/papers links for many years: Especially interesting are the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course presentations.
- Shameless plug for my list of Physically based rendering resources page. A more recent collection of PBR is also available here.
- The Journal of Computer Graphics Techniques offers open access to many interesting papers:
- The GDC Vault offers (mostly free) access to Game Developer Conference presentations and videos.
- NVidia’s GPU technology conference on-demand has general GPU programming applications but quite a few related to real time rendering as well.
- @knarkowicz has been collecting Game Developer Conference links for the past few years.
- Digital Dragons YouTube channel offers recordings on presentations
- Ke-Sen Huang collects links to papers from most realtime rendering conferences out there.
- Awesome weekly list of graphics programming links with summary by @jendrikillner
- The High Performance Graphics conference proceedings is also worth studying. You can access previous years by changing the year in the URL.
- I3D Conference is another great venue for graphics techniques (suggested by @gubnun)
- Many IHVs have blogs on which they post about graphics techniques and specifics of their hardware: AMD’s GPUOpen site, NVidia’s developer blog and Intel’s Developer Zone.
- On the Beyond3D forums one can find news and interesting discussions on graphics techniques and hardware.
Finally, follow other graphics programmers on Twitter. The graphics community there is great and shares a lot of tips and advice about graphics techniques. Also some of the graphics programmers have blogs which are worth following.
Even if you don’t have much graphics experience don’t feel intimidated and don’t avoid studying these resources. At the very least, skim through them to get the gist and to see the results. As you build experience things will start clicking into place. Don’t be discouraged by the Maths of a technique if you find it hard initially, you can always come back later. I suspect many experienced graphics programmers often skip it during the first pass, I know I do (yes, it will probably take you many reads to fully understand a technique).
If I have missed any important state-of-the-art graphics resource please add it in the comment sections and I will update the list.
Updated 15/8/2021: Added new Siggraph Rendering Engine Architecture course
Interplay of Light 
This is a great list!