Thread: Are shaders faster than fixed functionality

I know shaders are capable of producing some very nice effects, but, what if for example, I did per-vertex lighting in a shader. Would it be faster than using default fixed functionality?

-psychopath

This question cannot really be answered without a deeper understanding of how to actually perform the lighting. The ultimate answer is yes and no. You can certainly beat the default lighting routines but it may require shortcuts such as using lookup tables for sqrt. A lot of this depends on the driver you are trying to beat and the card you are writing the vertex shader for. There's just too many factors to give a single ultimate answer.