Hi,

there are some graphic cards around without hardware vertex shader. They use the DirecX software emulation vertex unit instead.

On my netbook it was possible to run the shaderviewer demo, but the model was not optimized for this card.

My question, is what I should do if shader version tells it is "20". This means no hardware vertex shader but full pixelshader 2.0 support.

Should I use a lowpoly model in order to avoid high load on the software vertex shader? Do I need changes for normal mapping shader in order to move some work from vertex unit to pixel unit?

Is it possible to pre calculate parts of the vertex unit into a texture an throw it directly into the pixel unit later at runtime?

What kind of shader should be avoided if the vertex unit is the bottleneck?
Besides loading a different model if shaderversion "20" is detected, should I define a fallback technique?

Ok, my questions don't target a special shader because the style of the game is currently undefined. But it could kick some styles from the possible list, if they are not possible with shaders on such a machine.

-- slacer