I am curious about pixel shading and shader effects.

I am just starting to look into this and ran across ATI's
Render Monkey tool.

Can the output from this tool be used by the new system in GameStudio? Render Monkey

Yes, Rendermonkey can be used, but it's only partially useful. First, most examples use pixel shader version 1.4, which is only supported by a few 3D cards. Second, the output format is DX9 .fx, which has a few differences to DX8 .fx. So the output files require some manual adaptions before they can be imported in A6.