Shader 2.0 vs 3.0
 

How big will the difference be if you will play with 2.0 or 3.0?
Will 2.0 even run?

I think you will find SH4 uses PS 2.0 and not 3.0
I doubt there will be much of a difference between the two because of this and i assume most people use PS 3.0 anyway

Oh and welcome to Subsim :)

Thanks for the info. Im running 2.0. I brought the last GF 5000 card (FX 5950 Ultra) some years ago. I sould have waited some months and brought a 6000 card. But if I still can play SHIV with it, the problem is gone!:smug:

You can, but only at minimum to low-medium details.

Scroll to the bottom of the page for system requirements

http://digitalstore.ubi.com/product....d=178&pid=3264

Does NOT mention supporting a 5000 series card

To be honist Josh, you can get a geforce 6 series for quite a cheep price now... I recommend searching for a Geforce 6600 card. its cheap and you will be able to play SH4 on med-High no prob :up:

The 5xxx series supports PS 2.0, so it does work.

DevChat>The minimum requirements to run SH4 would be: 2GHz processor (Pentium IV or equivalent AMD Athlon), 1GB of RAM, DirectX 9 video card with Pixel Shader v2.0, Vertex Shader v2.0 with 128MB of RAM
DevChat> A recommended system will have: 3GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, DirectX 9 video card with PS 3.0, VS 3.0 and 256MB of RAM.

I have not seen any comparisons in SH4 yet but since the devs wrote that PS3/VS3 are recommended I assume they actualy used them strongly which makes very much sense when it comes to transparent water simulation.

http://games.tiscali.cz/images/news/farcryps.jpg

I noticed that Vertex Shader goes up as high as 8 for some cards.

Would a card that supports Vertex Shader above 3 result in better
graphics for SH4 ?

Currently SH4 supports Vertex Shaders up to Version 3.0 (dx9c) Maybe there will be a a further enhancement in a patch to 4.0 (dx10). I dont know about a version beyond 4.0

http://img219.imageshack.us/img219/9277/shaderlv7.jpg

No, that´s only the number of vertex shaders a card has, hardware-wise. The lastest VS version itself is 4.0, that´s for DX10 cards. The more vertex shaders a card has, the faster it is going to process those instructions. DX9 cards support Vertex Shader 3 and have up to 8 vertex shaders.

Thanks Gizzmoe, that explains it !

SH4 uses 2.0 OR 3.0! Hmm, I think in SH4 the difference between 2.0 and 3.0 may be transparent water effects. It can be done with 2.0 but 3.0 has some real good advantages. we will find out very soon! :)

Those are very cool pictures but I wonder if the frame rates are high enough for smooth play with shader 3 turned on? I own an xbox360 and I have gears of war, wondered if that's shader 3 because it looks very good! I dont know if it's quite that good (as in that pic of the new far cry) but it looks very nice.

I bet anyone running a shader 3 game would need an uber fast cpu with loads of ram and crap. Ahh maybe next christmas I'll have the dough saved up for such a system, but I doubt it LOL

True, i have this card and is good low cost solution, and runs very well in all games at 1024x768, i played a lot of games with very smooth frame rates
(doom3, sh3, serious sam 2,farcry,etc)

i don´t want change my card until i upgrade my computer . with a new motherboard,cpu,and graphic c.