One of the big problems I see with shaders and "current generation" video cards is that the techniques to get ncie visuals on a card without vertex/pixel shaders are completely different than the approach you can take with shaders. And there isn''t an easy fallback. At least with multiple textures, for example, you can fall back to multipass rendering.

Thus in regard Wavewash''s comments, the independent game dev is in a bit of a quandry. He can target a low end card, say a geforce 2 and hope for a bigger audience, but at the same time the people with "high end card" (read thas something with shaders) are laughing at the graphics... that is unless the independent game dev has the time to write good code for both generation of cards, which he probably doesn''t.

I think a partial solution might be to provide "good enough" graphics for the old generation cards, and then focus on getting the most out of current and next gen cards.

>>waiting for either ATI or 3DLabs to make a big
>>glowing ''download version 1.5'' button so it can finaly grab a
>>version with GLSlang support

i have been on the 3Dlabs OpenGL shading language Master Class event in Munich, last week; and there they used RenderMonkey with GLSL support to show us all this fancy stuff; i''m not sure what version it was, but, IIRC it was 1.5 (but it could have been a special "for 3dlabs only"-version, dont know)

DJSnow
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I think the two biggest pitfalls are (1) learning a shader language (not an easy task if you''ve never used ASM) and (2) they keep getting better! You can do things with ps3.0 that aren''t even physically possible with earlier versions. I like to see graphics hardware advance as much as the next guy, but it took what, a year before ps1.4 was completely obsolete? Most people don''t have the cash to buy bleeding-edge video cards every other week.

I''m still a fan of doing things in software. If your code is tight, you don''t even need hardware acceleration.

That was a half-joke.

Sometimes you just have to make the cut at some level. The art path isn''t backwards compatible. You don''t have to be on the bleeding edge of hw because different games have different rendering styles. There is a need for cell shading, for super realistic shading, for a combination of 2D and 3D shading, etc. It''s not like everyone is going to go super realistic with their games of all the sudden. It wouldn''t fit the style of some games.