We've been talking to one of the developers from BTU Games, who are currently working on two intriguing projects from a graphical point of view - Firstly, a game title based around Crytek's game engine (as seen in Far Cry), and secondly a game engine of their very owned, named Shiva. We've asked some questions about the technical aspects of these projects, which has given us some fascinating information to digest.

"Q: What kind of benefits are you getting using Shader Model 3.0 - Will you support Shader Model 2.0 and 2.0b at all or will you switch back to 1.x? What kind of quality/performance loss is expected there?

We aren't really modifying shaders in the Cry engine much, fine tuning here and there if necessary. The engine is fairly flexible and very complete in feature sets so we really didn't need to do much at all. We will support anything supported in the Cry engine.

Shiva is a bit of a different story, the engine is meant to work on all cards from the GeForce 3 up and have certian capabilities in lower end PS 1.0 cards that are only available on other engines on todays high-end cards. They can be called hacks but we like to call them here clever ways to circumvent hardware restrictions. HDR, Parallax with self-shadowing both work well on PS 1.0 cards. We're still working on soft shadows on lower end cards but haven't been able to figure out a suitable work around, this we might have to drop.