is it right that the number of instructions inside a pixel shader is limitated?

yes but its pretty high i dont think u could use it up.... ;-)

i tried something like that:

ps.1.1
tex t0
mul r0,t0,v0
add r0,r0,r0
add r0,r0,r0
add r0,r0,r0
add r0,r0,r0
add r0,r0,r0

but then if i place more instructions i get the message effect unsupported by hardware

what kinda grafx card do you have?

im not sure about 3dgs with shaders but that looks like good old direct x to me and u would need a prettty good grafxs card to run that lol. ive got a geforce 4 ti 4800 and i doubt it would work. if i know anything about shaders in 3dgs i would test it for ya. but sorry i dont..

Since version 1.4 the pixel shader is fully programmable. The older versions are not, so they are limited to a certain number of instructions per pass (about 8).

yes, you are allowed a total of 4 texture instructions and 8 arithmetic instructions (in ps1.1-ps1.3).

all right. thats what i thought. can i use ps.1.4 with 3dgs? im not at home to test it but i'd like to know now.

Sure you can... if you have a GeForce FX by chance.

so if my hardware supports it i can go even to ps.2.0 ?