Very good and informative post etonbears.
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.
