Dis-unified Shading is a good approach and it will run DirectX 9 games fast for the months to come, but it won't much help developers, as these chaps have to prepare to write unified code.Read more over here.
It is a take-it-or-leave-it offer, as Microsoft requires them to use unified shaders from now on.
The Unified Shader concept pays dividends but at the same time it brings some additional troubles.
When you (over)load the Pixel Shader which is the case in most of the games to come, the vertex Shader comes for free. In this case you can tell your artists: Don’t draw a normal map, please model it for me. This is how it works in DirectX 9 games..
ATI better positioned to deliver unified shaders
Posted on Monday, September 25 2006 @ 16:18 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck