I'm glad you found it helpful. Realtime rendering used in games is an increasingly complex "soup" of computational components, each of which trade-off "realism" and "performance" to provide an appealing outcome. It can all be fairly described as "smoke and mirrors" rather than physically realistic, which is generally OK, since the visuals for many games are "artistic", not "realistic".
There is no shortage of useful information about rendering for programmers, but I haven't seen much for gamers themselves that is particularly good. A lot of what NVidia, AMD, Intel, Microsoft et al put out while marketing their products is of questionable value.
Yeah I have been working with making a game for the last year. Personally, I use Blender/Unreal. Although they have made the game engines so much easier than years ago, it still is as you called it, a complicated soup balancing realism and performance. Every time I think I have learned something new, there is a dozen little things I have to adjust. But I love any info from more knowledgeable people in regards to utilizing engines. Also, Unreal has an incredible community, and online "classes" and the things I have learned just from the Blender Cloud subscription is so great. I have absolutely fallen in love with character sculpting. I used to think Blender was not a professional modeling software, but it is a beast! I love it!
