Just out of curiosity...you wouldn't be testing the game/demo on DIFFERENT generations of cards, would you?...like say, a DX9 ATI card, supporting those pixel shader effects and a DX7-8 NVIDIA card that doesn't?

ATI Radeon 9500+ and NVIDIA Geforce FX+ = DX9 cards...the ones before that aren't.

From my reading up on my Radeon 9800 I learned that it supports 2.0 shader, so with much anticipation I tried some of the new shaders presented here...

Now ok, it all honesty its most likely that I have done something wrong, but it seems that most of these cool shaders just give me a black object, and don't seem to run.

I wonder why this is? Maybe the 9800 isnt really 2.0? Or is there some kind of difference between implementing an Ati shader and a Nvidia one? Would explain why games developers tend to pick one over the other....

that must be definately your fault: i think missing textures

note that i have a radeon9800, too

As much as I hate to admit it, Ello I think you are most probably correct!

I have just had a little success with a basic bump map shader from Steampipe so i just need to work from there...

If it runs on yours it should run on mine ....