Why Do Game Tests 2 And 3 in 3DMark03 Only Use Pixel Shader 1.4 or 1.1?
According to the DirectX 8 specification, there are 4 different pixel shader models. In order to do a fair benchmark, you want any hardware to do the minimum number of shader passes necessary to render the desired scene. We analyzed all 4 shader models and found that for our tests Pixel Shader 1.2 and Pixel Shader 1.3 did not provide any additional capabilities or performance over Pixel Shader 1.1. Therefore we provided two code paths in order to allow for the broadest compatibility.
