parhelia pixelshaders?

[TdB]

does multitexture count as a stage?
let me see if I get this:
a GPU that can do 4 textures in 1 pass and has a 5-stage shader(stages = #ops), has 9 stages, but parhelia has 4 pipelines with a shader each, so it can quadtexture and pixelshade 4 pixels per clock.
where a gf4ti has 4 pipelines whith 2 texturemapping units each and all shares the same single pixelshader, so a gf4ti can dualtexture 4 pixels per clock, but it can only dualtexture + pixelshade 1 pixel per clock, because it only have 1 pixelshader.

so a gf4ti with a 2-stage shader, does
2 textures + 2 pixelshader ops = 4
and it only have 1 pixelshader so 1 * 4 = 4

[CaineTanathos]

yep I think thats correct, but at the moment pixelshaders aren't used that much yet, well actually I can't think of any game at the moment

maybe NWO (New World Order)

[TdB]

well, i expect parhelia to deliever playable framerates even when pixelshaders becomes the norm, i don´t expect that from a gf4ti.
in short: I expect parhelia to be way more future-proof, than the other dx8 chips. the additional dx9 features will help too, however im not sure how parhelia will deal with heavy use of displacemet maps and such, maybe depth adaptive tesselation will save parhelia from being useless in such games, maybe not.
that depends if "dat" has to be natively supported in the game(which will only happen if the competition supports it too). do you know if "dat" is a dx9 feature or a parhelia-specific feature?

BTW i have heard that parhelia gets around 50 fps in morrowind when looking at the water, compared to 18 fps on a radeon8500, so maybe the benefit of the additional pixelshaders will show up in existing pixelshader-titles too.
if nothing else, then it may give a significant boost in 3dmark2001.