Pixel Shader?

[Toby42]

What is Pixel Shader 3.0 or later? I'm not familiar with that term. Also, is anyone running this on a laptop? I've a laptop with 4gig's of ram, but only a 15.6 screen. My desktop only has 1 gig of ram....

[Miket_nz]

I'm running on a laptop with a 17inch screen and a whopping 512mb ram, bit slow, but plays perfectly well.....

[Toby42]

Thanks for the info? It might run on both of my machines then! What do you know about the Pixel shader req's? I'm not familiar with that term....

[Arctic Blast]

Pixel Shader is part of your graphics card specs. Here's a wiki page covering the 'starter' cards and chipsets that have each level of Shader.

[Toby42]

Thanks for the link. It looks like my desktop only supports Pixel Shader 2.0? I'll have to check on my laptop. It's a newer machine by six years!

[Toby42]

What will happen if I try to run this on my desk top which only supports Pixel Shader 2.0? Just curious [8|]

[mercenarius]

Mostly what you should see with Shader 2.0 is that the transitions between screens like menus will be very jerky or slow. Fading to black and fading into a new screen from black will be jerky or slow.

By the way, as the Wikipedia link above notes, Shader 3.0 for DirectX means hardware support for DirectX 9.0c which is what the game wants. A 9.0b card (like a GeForce FX 5700) will have the trouble I noted above. It depends on the driver, but it won't run very well. To do those transitions nicely they must be done in hardware, not software.

Newer machines with decent integrated graphics are another matter, but that is not at issue here. Those machines may be doing some things in software, but they have much faster RAM than a 6-year old machine.