well it shouldnt be confusing, But Ati seems to have broken what seemed to be thier entire card naming Scheme.
Radeon 7000 series were fully dx 7 complient. 8500 was dx 8.1 complient.
But the radeon 9000 isnt dx 9 complient...its not even as fast as a 8500 le.
The 8500 has now been renamed the 9100-9200 series. (squeeze a few more sales i guess)
the 9600,9700 and 9800 can all do dx9 pixel shaders(I think,someone Correct If im wrong)....and at the moment faster than the fx series.
Hopefully Nvidia will fix thier driver problems soon.
Technicaly the 5900 ultra "spec wise" should best the 9800 quite well...but Nvidia seem to have lost thier driver edge these days.

Ive never had any complaints yet about my 8500 pro 128 meg.
its still kicking along quite well.
now the 7200 in my other computer..is starting to really chug along..lol


Zmatrix

Thanks, that was pretty much exactly what i wanted to know. There´s still a lot opf cool stuf that can be done with vertex shaders obviously.

So, one cannot manipulatre textures and create bumpmapping for example, with vertexshaders?

You can't create bumpmapping with vertex shaders, and yes you can manipulate texture-cordinates, but not e.g. texture blending, or the texture itself.

~Phantom88~

Thanks. Bear with me: those "alternate" techniques described in read_beta are for different "makes" of hardware then rather then different "generations"?

and one more small idiot question: is it possible to do evironment mapping (reflections...) without pixel shaders? If one can move the texture around i guess i could use som second skin in some way or , No?

Yes, enviroment mapping is a vertex-program effect, because you only need to manipulate the texture cordinates.

~Phantom88~