What's the difference between shaders and good graphics? Is there like a certain line that seperates normal graphics from shaders? EDIT: No... no... I mean like... Okay, some graphics cards are completely unable to handle what is called shaders. Shaders are avaliable for other games as well... so my graphics card can handle pretty good graphics, but it can't handle shaders... so what excactly makes shaders different from other graphics?

Have you seen pictures?
Shaders
No Shaders

read what he said more carefully

Thanks. Shaders just makes it look 100x more epic. That's about it.

so shaders are better than high quality graphics?

shaders are used in conjunction with high quality graphics. Almost every modern game contains shaders.

Shaders are an option that come with all newer graphics cards. It allows for better lighting effects and shadows by shading pixels or some shit. I'm not sure on the specifics, but pretty much every game in the last few years have used some sort of pixel shader. They are just a lot more extreme in TB because of how basic the game was before.

Now to answer your question about some sort of line that defines good graphics from shaders. The answer is no. Shaders are a component of all high end, or even by today's standards, med-low end, graphics. It is not it's own level (above "Highest") of awesome. It only seems like that in Toribash because of how extreme the difference is. You can think of it like an HD filter. Maybe even if you have bad eyesight. No-shaders is without your glasses, while shaders is when you have your glasses on. How good you see is dependent on the strength of your glasses (or in this case, the graphics card).

I hope this helps you, and anyone else who wants to know, understand what shaders are. Feel free to ask any more questions. Remember that I'm no expert, I'm just going off of years of PC gaming experience.

I'm not an expert as well too! So maybe it's a bit off, but this is my understanding of it.

Vertex shaders are programs that translate vertex positions into screen positions. Fragment/pixel shaders are programs that decide if a pixel should be drawn to the screen and what color it should have. So when you're drawing triangles in 3D space, the vertex shader translates each vertex of every triangle into screen positions, and the fragment shader handles every pixel within each of those 2D triangles. Sort of.

Which is what happens if you're not using shaders as well. The big deal is that you get to write the programs that do this instead of just configuring some fixed functionality. So then there are a bunch of new graphical effects you can come up with and write shaders for.

But Toribash use shaders 2.0 right ?
that means theres somethin called shaders 1.0 ?
is it possible to make it work with TB ?

3.3 beta needs at least opengl1.4, but with a 64mb gfx card...