Excellent. Thank you. That gives me two follow-up questions:

1. So how will the Normal Mapping shaders and such get better or easier when 9 is implemented? (I assume there's got to be something good about DX9)

2. If DX9 features are not the video card's limitation for the current batch of shaders, what is? For instance, your Normal Mapping shader runs beautifully on my Quadro4 900 XGL, but objects go transparent on my ATI mobility M4 (kind of a cool ice-cube effect actually ). What is it specifically that older video cards need to run the current shaders?