I still have some unanswered questions:

What are vertex and pixel shaders? What's the pros and cons between the 2?

Explain what the specs mean in the specs for my Radeon 9600 XT card?

One final thing, my beach has a very low-res texture and I can't think of any way to make it look better without the possibility of using a 16384x16384 texture for a resolution of 2 quants per pixel.... Right now, I'm using a 2048x2048 texture and the resolution is a horrible 18 quants per pixel, even with the entire mapping filling the entire space (only a top mapping is needed) . If I can apply bump mapping, I could use a 1024x1024 texture or even 512x512. There isn't any other way that I can think of to make it look at least halfway decent. Bump mapping may seem to be a useful option....