I have created a normalmapping shader with diffuse + specular lighting based on the sun. As a LOD2 technique (beta feature) I have a shader that does normalmapping without specular and as the lowest LOD, LOD3 I have a shader that does just per vertex diffuse lighting and fogging. This last shader is very fast , but I wonder if it is smart to use a shader for this at all.. Would an FFP effect be faster in this case? I heard many hardware vendors nowadays emulate the fixed function pipeline with shaders, but those shaders might be more optimized..

Does anyone know more about this? I guess that FFP is faster on old cards, and that for modern cards I'm better of writing a simple shader that does exactly and only what I want it to. Can someone confirm that?

Also, where can I learn more about writing FFP effects?