Well, since I'm slowly starting to work on the engine's renderer, I wonder what kinds of graphics cards you people have. It wouldn't be of much use if the engine ran only on my hardware configuration

It is possible to write fallback shaders for some older cards or maybe some more complex system for detecting hardware capabilities like the one Startopia has, but it takes time, which can be spend on coding other things. It'd be nice to know that certain generations of graphic cards can be safely ruled out (without angering the players).

There is also a nice utility caled OpenGL Extension Viewer, which can be found at the following address http://www.softpedia.com/get/Programming/Other-Programming-Files/OpenGL-Extension-Viewer.shtml. It lets you know of the features your card has and also can perform some simple benchmarks. Results can also be exported into an XML file, which you can mail me (you can use my sourceforge email address - just click the link in my sig, i'm the only developer so far). You don't have to do this, but it'll be very helpful (or you can post the name of your card here and I can look it up in some database).

By the way, Terra is being currently developed on my AMD Sempron 2600+, 1 GB RAM and GeForce 7600GS (full dx9/ogl2.0). And I hope to have some kind of alpha/pre-alpha demo by the end of summer

I think the majority of users are going to have at minimum a directx 8 capable card in their system at this point. It would be nice to include functionality for some older shaders but overhead is unrealistic for a hobbist programmer. My opinion would be to focus on DirectX9+ for ATI and NVIDIA performance.

My systems currently:

Sager 5720 w/ 7800 GTX GO 256MB
Opteron170 w/ 7800 GS AGP 256MB

My brothers new laptop:

PowerPro J 10:15 w/ 8600GT 512MB

I haven't a clue what I have, I just know I'm Vista-capable, so that's what I voted.

SLI, 2x256 MB 6800 LE's

This was exactly my point

And so far it seems you won't have any problems running my game(s) since most of you have better hardware than me

At the moment I've got a a fairly good computer, with plans to upgrade to a more 64-bit based computer in '08.

My specs are:

Intel Xeon dual 3.06Ghz CPU.
With 2 Gbs of Ram.
An nVidia 512mb Gefore 7600 GS.

That's all that is important so yeah, I've got pixel shader 3.

well I'm looking at an absolute minimum of Pixel shader 1.0 for my game. If you want to use the bloom lighting (makes everything a little smoother and blurs color transitions a little) its shader 2.0 (Errr now that I think about it, I think you need shader 2.0 for the shaders that I'm using so it's not optional)

Seeing as how cards for this type of stuff has been out for years I would say shoot for a dead minimum of pixel shader 1.0

I don't know about openGL, but direct X has pretty much gone straight shader orientated (using high level shader language or HLSL). Therefore it's a definite minimum of pixel shader 1.0 (really 1.1) unless if you write a seperate fixed function pipeline renderer which would be absolutely silly.

I would stay in the realm of DX9 though (I assume with the Vista stuff you were talking about DX10).

I just checked realtech database and even old Radeons 8500 support ARB_shading_language extension, so it should be possible for owners of these cards to play games based on terra engine too (with latest drivers), but I guess they'd hit other hardware constraints like max. number of instructions/registers per shader, texturing units, etc.

And DX10 (or OpenGL equivalent) is not going to happen anytime soon from two main reasons. First, I don't have DX10 capable hardware, and second, I don't have enough artists...yet (and experience with the high-end shaders). So I hope that owners of those lovely GeForce 8Ks won't be disappointed

And thank you all for your votes