Programmable Shading Techniques in Graphics Hardware (e.g., NVIDIA GeForce4 and ATI Radeon)
For example, how to use per-pixel shading to achieve realistic water, reflection, or bumpy surface. For technical information, you may visit NVIDIA Developer's pages, then use keyword search.
Another interesting way to use programmable shaders is to produce procedural textures such as wood or marble surface using Perlin's noise.
Interactive rendering of large mdels, such as the terrain models at Large Geometric Models Archive (in PLY format) at Georgia Tech.
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Implementation of progressive mesh or other polygonal simplification techniques.
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Implementation of a 3D game engine, such as one that may display the Quake 3 maps.
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Simulation of cloth, water, hairs, fur, ...etc.
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(More suggestions are coming soon.)