So I stumbled on this post on 3dmotive.com and instantly thought that everybody on polycount had to see this. Its a collection of a whole bunch of interesting shader/game engine tricks that were done inside of a bunch of well known games, I had a hard time understanding half the stuff he was talking about but never the less it was still an incredibly interesting read.
http://simonschreibt.de/game-art-tricks/
Full credit to Simon Schreibt for this awesome read!
Replies
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1759176#post1759176
It does get buried by other threads sometime.