If I made a game with shaders, put it on a disc, and ran it on a PC that only had the default graphics card what would happen? Would I get an error message? would the game be slower? would the effects just not show?

Depends on the computer...

And what do you mean by default graphics card? Most newer computers have high-end graphics cards by default.

not necessarily, a lot of computers have integrated graphics cards, actually most of them do, now most new GAMING computers have high end graphics cards. as far as the shaders go, you need to work around it, there is a command in 3dgs that returns the shader version that that card has, you just would put an if statement saying if graphics card has shader model x, then run shader x, else use default shading.

d3d_shaderversion

oh I see. So I have to tell 3DGS to use a shader IF their card supports it, otherwise use no shader. Makes sense. Just asking out of curiousity, if I didn't use that code then would I get an error message?

xXxGuitar511 - I meant an intergrated graphics card, my bad.

if it's a GPU even below the dx7 level, you'll get a d3d_initialization xyz error and the game won't start.

I really don't know much about the integrated graphics cards, so I don't know their capabilities. It will need to support DX9 and whatever shader version u are using (Probably VSPS 2.0)

oh okay, it's a dx9 though. And I think integrated graphic cards don't support shaders period.

yeah, there are some integrated cards that do offer shaders, like my friend just got a coumputer with an itegrated.... i think nvidia 6600? i dont remember but i looked it up when he first got it, and apparently it was the first integrated card to support sm3