[hovz]

http://www.ixbt-labs.com/articles2/gffx/fc12.html

the bottom part is very interesting. apparently vertex instancing is completely useless. and

"FarCry 1.2 example demonstrated that Shaders 3.0 are real and effective and that many games will be capable of their support in case of a flexible engine. Obtained results are somewhat ambiguous: on the one hand, we witnessed performance gain in several places; on the other hand, it seems that the improvement, which brought considerable rendering gain (several light sources at one pass), could have been implemented with Shaders 2.x (possibly even 2.0). Thus I would like to wish the developers not only to promote the latest technologies, but also not to forget and optimize the game performance with the existing video cards. However all performance gains in the above tests are actually due to pass reduction at rendering lighting. That is the current implementation has no merits achieved via the features of Shaders 3.0. "

now every time i read some uninformed jackass rant on about shader model 3 in the current gen i will just post this