I've spent the past hour searching around trying to find any definitive information on whether the Shader 3.0 mod does more harm then good with Nvidia cards.

 

Some claim it actually hurts performance. Some say it helps slightly. Some say it looks better. Some say they see no difference. Some say it sharpens distant textures. Some say it induces blurries.

 

The problem is all these opinions are mostly scattered in the original Shader 3 thread here (can't find much of anything else on other forums) and most of that thread is from 2010 before he even released his latest versions and before anyone really had a chance to do serious testing.

 

One thing I'm sure of is that it makes the water look worse (even with using some of the edited

waterconstant.xml's out there to fix the animation isues). There's a solution by simply copying the old water shaders back in but that kind of defeats one of the major purposes of this mod (supposedly better looking and performing water).

Has anyone done any actual benchmarking on performance and tested for visual differences for Nvidia users? Obviously, for ATI users it is highly positive change in clouds, etc. but should Nvidia users even bother? Am I gaining anything to make up for the worse looking water?

 

Thanks.

I guess this is why I couldn't find any real information. Seems there may be none judging by the lack of responses? Anyway, I did some quick and dirty tests.

NGX, UT2 100%, Runway at KSEA facing downtown/terminal in view, Orbx PNW. Fair weather theme selected. Frames locked at 30. BP=0 tweak being used.

With the Shader 3.0 mod I got got 24.4 FPS. Without the Shader 3.0 mod I got 26.2 FPS.

I repeated this test three times, installing and uninstalling the Shader 3.0 mod, and the results were always the same and the FPS readings were steady.

Now, after about 45 seconds my frames dropped by about 4 FPS without touching anything (something has to of loaded? UT2 was already in though, so I'm not sure what. Wish I could figure out what it is that caused the drop). But this isn't relevant to this test because the 4 FPS drop was the same and constant in both setups. So the Shader 3.0 setup went down to 20 FPS or so and the non Shader 3.0 setup went down to 22 FPS after 45 seconds.

Just some food for thought. I could find no visual difference except the water was uglier in the Shader 3.0 setup. While I can't claim these tests are certain as other setups may introduce other variables, for me at least, it seems the Shader 3.0 mod is actually a negative with my Nvidia GTX 570.

BTW, if anyone has any guesses about what may of loaded up that caused the later drop in FPS I'd be interested to know.

It wasn't anything visual that I could see.