Visual Effects
A collection of a wide area of specific PDF's. Most are tutorials or in depth explanations of a given topic. I'll try list article subjects as I can. If you have a useful article, please leave a comment with a link to it.
http://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2010/index.html
Covers the following topics -
Caustics Mapping: An Image-space Technique for Real-time Caustics
http://graphics.cs.ucf.edu/caustics/
http://www.csee.umbc.edu/~olano/papers/causticvolume.pdf
http://graphics.di.uoa.gr/Downloads/papers/journals/
Various random graphics articles
Parthenon Demo
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/Sander-Parthenon.pdf
A Survey and Classification of Real Time Rendering Methods
http://www.merl.com/papers/docs/TR2000-09.pdf
A Practical Analytic Single Scattering Model for Real Time Rendering.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~ravir/papers/singlescat/scattering.pdf
ATI PDF database search
Real-Time Realistic Rendering of Nature Scenes with Dynamic Lighting
http://www.kevinboulanger.net/publications/thesisKevinBoulanger.pdf
Gives a good read into real-time rendering of grass and trees with advanced lighting techniques and LOD implementation. Includes some psuedo- code
http://courses.essex.ac.uk/ce/ce318/www/documents/references/3dGraphics.pdf
A huge article with tons of graphics information including -
Alpha mapping
Ambient occlusion
Anisotropic filtering
Back-face culling
Beam tracing
Bidirectional texture function
Bilinear filtering
Binary space partitioning
Bounding interval hierarchy
Bounding volume
Bump mapping
Catmull–Clark subdivision surface
Conversion between quaternions and Euler angles
Cube mapping
Diffuse reflection
Displacement mapping
Doo–Sabin subdivision surface
Edge loop
Euler operator
False radiosity
Fragment
Geometry pipelines
Geometry processing
Global illumination
Gouraud shading
Graphics pipeline
Hidden line removal
Hidden surface determination
High dynamic range rendering
Image-based lighting
Image plane
Irregular Z-buffer
Isosurface
Lambert's cosine law
Lambertian reflectance
Level of detail
Mipmap
Newell's algorithm
Non-uniform rational B-spline
Normal mapping
Oren–Nayar reflectance model
Painter's algorithm
Parallax mapping
Particle system
Path tracing
Per-pixel lighting
Phong reflection model
Phong shading
Photon mapping
Photon tracing
Polygon
Potentially visible set
Precomputed Radiance Transfer
Procedural generation
Procedural texture
3D projection
Quaternions and spatial rotation
Radiosity
Ray casting
Ray tracing
Reflection
Reflection mapping
Relief mapping
Render Output unit
Rendering
Retained mode
Scanline rendering
Schlick's approximation
Screen Space Ambient Occlusion
Self-shadowing
Shadow mapping
Shadow volume
Silhouette edge
Spectral rendering
Specular highlight
Specularity
Sphere mapping
Stencil buffer
Stencil codes
Subdivision surface
Subsurface scattering
Surface caching
Surface normal
Texel
Texture atlas
Texture filtering
Texture mapping
Texture synthesis
Tiled rendering
UV mapping
UVW mapping
Vertex
Vertex Buffer Object
Vertex normal
Viewing frustum
Virtual actor
Volume rendering
Volumetric lighting
Voxel
Z-buffering
Z-fighting
Simulation of Wrinkled Surfaces Revisited
http://image.diku.dk/projects/media/morten.mikkelsen.08.pdf
A general method for preserving attribute values on simplified meshes
http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/publications/papers/rocchini.pdf
Appearance-Preserving Simplification
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~geom/APS/APS.pdf
Shader Performance Analysis on a Modern GPU Architecture
http://www.csh.rit.edu/~oguns/ps3/vmoya.pdf
Contemporary GPU system architecture
CUDA and OpenCL --- Development Interfaces for Multicore Programming
Interactive Horizon Mapping
http://research.microsoft.com/~cohen/bs.pdf
Automatic Shader Level of Detail
http://www.cs.unc.edu/~olano/papers/aslod.pdf
http://www.ati.com/developer/gdc/D3DTutorial07_AlexEvans_Final.pdf
Crafting Physically Motivated Shading Models for Game Development
Point Based Color Bleeding
http://graphics.pixar.com/library/PointBasedColorBleeding/paper.pdf
Stupid Spherical Harmonics (SH) Tricks
http://www.ppsloan.org/publications/StupidSH36.pdf
Pitfalls of Object Oriented Programming
Multi-core is Here! But How Do You Resolve Data Bottlenecks in PC Games?
http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/AMD_GDC_2008_MW.pdf
The Technology Behind the 3D Graphics and Games Course “Unreal Engine 4 Elemental demo”
http://www.unrealengine.com/files/misc/The_Technology_Behind_the_Elemental_Demo_16x9_(2).pdf
CPU Caches and Why You Care
http://www.aristeia.com/TalkNotes/ACCU2011_CPUCaches.pdf
paulbourke.net/geometry/polygonise/index.html
http://www.realtimerendering.com/
Many free resources to graphics programming
http://kesen.realtimerendering.com/
http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/games/SteepParallax/
http://www.gamedev.net/topic/624752-glossy-screen-space-reflections/
http://www.gamedev.net/blog/1323/entry-2254101-real-time-local-reflections/
http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/papers/surfacefitting/
http://www.arcsynthesis.org/gltut/index.html
http://www.realtimerendering.com/
Gives an excellent amount of resources on many areas of computer graphics.
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems3/gpugems3_part01.html
Nice resource for many different areas of programming a GPU, a must read
http://rbwhitaker.wikidot.com/index-and-vertex-buffers
Index and vertex buffers explained.
http://cellperformance.beyond3d.com/articles/index.html
Toward Photorealism in Virtual Botany
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter01.html
Terrain Rendering Using GPU-Based Geometry Clipmaps
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter02.html
Inside Geometry Instancing
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter03.html
Segment Buffering
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter04.html
Optimizing Resource Management with Multistreaming
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter05.html
Hardware Occlusion Queries Made Useful
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter06.html
Deferred Shading in S.T.A.L.K.E.R
http://http.developer.nvidia.com/GPUGems2/gpugems2_chapter09.html
http://macton.posterous.com/roundup-recent-sketches-on-concurrency-data-d#
http://assemblyrequired.crashworks.org/2009/01/04/fcmp-conditional-moves-for-branchless-math/
http://seven-degrees-of-freedom.blogspot.com/2009/10/latency-elephant.html
http://osl.iu.edu/~tveldhui/papers/Expression-Templates/exprtmpl.html