Just by curiosity, why can't you ship precompiled shaders?
Simply because the modded game (STALKER) won't support it. The game expects all shaders to be located in a specific sub-folder in pure HLSL source code. Everything else won't work. But please don't ask me why the dev's decided not to allow compilded shaders...
As it has been said nested loops with texture sampling can be damn slow, as the compiler is trying to calculate correct ddx/ddy. If you can calculate them yourself or you can afford to sample a single mipmap the shader will compile more quickly.
That sounds interesting and might be helpful. I guess I'd need to use an other method than tex2D, so which one would be required here? And how would I sample a single mipmap?
). The possibility to use the new, fixed fxc alone while compiling and linking against June 2010 SDK is just awesome and saves us a lot of time and nerves now :-)
