I have tried Unity shaders with the pro trial version and found, A7 kicks Unity's ass into orbit shader-wise. Not because A7 shaders are faster, but they are better to develop, you see the effect immediately while you edit the code, Unity can not do that. And for any decent shader effect you must pay 5 times the money that you pay for A7.
I understand shader programmers, that they like A7. But at the same time keep in mind, that engines like Unity or C4 use a different and more closed approach to be cross-platform and to have a good fall-back strategy.
If you fiddle around manually on your shaders, they might work better for a certain situation, but they will not work on other systems in most cases.
Just take C4 as an example. There is a visual shader editor. The reason is that each shader will work under different lighting situations, with or without fog, at different gaming platforms. Each shader will work together with other shaders. They will be compiled from this graph in real-time on each platform just as needed.
You cannot achieve this when you write some HLSL code.
So it comes to the same point like always: A7 is great for learning and prototyping. But for a flexible cross-platform system, working on different targets (weak and good hardware) it will not work as good, or not at all, as competition does.
