which one is my Shader Model exactly!!?

Question

i have sapphire HD 5850 graphic card.. its shader model supposed to be 5
when i was using windows XP shader model was 3 and now i'm using windows 7 ultimate and it's 4.. !!!
i check my shader model by that website which tells u if u can run a game or not "can you run it"
so please tell me what's wrong with it? and what am i supposed to do fix this?

Answer 1

Hello UN4Given,



what awesome GPU you have man!

The main focus of the HD 5xxx series is support for DirectX 11. Shadder Model 5.0 was designed on mind for this. There is no support for Shader 5.0 on previous versions of Direct x, like the 10.0



This new API brings features like Hull Shaders, Tesselation, support for DirectCompute and more to the graphics card space. ATI’s new cards are the first cards to fully support this new standard. The HD5850 also supports OpenGL 3.2 which is the latest OpenGL standard from the Khronos Group. The important thing to take away from the HD 5 series is that it supports the latest APIs.



So your Shader is currently 5.0. But if you happen to enable a rendering feature called SSAO(Screen Space Ambient Occlusion), it might sometimes drop the level of your Shader. Komprende?



Please refer to the following articles if you need a detailed explanation and review about this powerful feature in your awesome GPU card :



http://www.guru3d.com/article/radeon-hd-5850-review-crossfire/5



http://www.motherboards.org/reviews/hardware/1956_14.html



I hope this helps to clear any doubt about your shader question. Take care UN4Given.

Answer 2

xp cannot go past shader model 3 but 7 should be at 5 that should be checked again

Answer 3

i think the shader kind (eg 2.0) is merely attainable with the acquisition of a GPU (video card) with it already. The extra contemporary GPU's have shader kind 3.0 so your 2.0 video games have no problems with that.