Hello, I have one more quick question about DX 9 Shaders. Ok, so say you have a variable A passed to a shader. The shader needs a bunch of additional information dependent solely on A, for example ... A*A, A/3, A*A + 7 etc. These are just examples. Yes, you could calculate them in the shader but they only need to be calculated once per BATCH and not once per vertex/pixel so that is inneficient ... Yes, you could calculate them on the CPU and pass them to the shader but that is sloppy and could quickly lead to confusions and misnamed confusing variables etc.... Neatness is important. So ... How does one do calculations IN A SHADER that are done only once per BATCH and not once per vertex/pixel. The only way I can think of is using an DX effect file and putting the calculations in a technique/pass but it is my understanding that only certain operations are ok in techniques/passes so that wouldn't work anyways. Is this understanding correct? Thank you for your help. Jeremy

Just want to add that pre shaders are only working if you use the effect framework. If you compile only your shaders the calculations will be executed on the GPU for every vertex/pixel.

Thank you very much. That is very helpful. Just what I need.

Question:
I am just trying to figure out how in depth and advanced the preshader is. Does it calculate and store ANY values that remain constants over the batch ... even the results of your own custom function calls and/or that use built in functions exp/pow etc. as well?

Thank you.
Jeremy