Two shaders - one only uses a texture and its normal map for lighting calculations ( point lights) and the other uses the same 2 textures + an extra texture( doesnt matter what texture…let`s say cube map )
Well the second shader goes faster with about 70 fps ( from 100 to 170 ) … I don`t even use the third texture, I only sample it…
The 2 shaders are EXACTLY the same, only the second one has an extra
TEX tex, fragment.texcoord[2], texture[2], 2D;(or3D , same result)
But it goes almost twice as fast !!
Yeah, i experienced the same thing, but not that extreme.
If i use specular lighting, my app becomes faster than if i disable specular lighting. Although i don´t sample any more textures, it’s only more ALU instructions.
That’s with ARB_fragment_program on a Radeon 9600XT, latest drivers. But the difference is not that huge, maybe 5%, so i didn’t bother about it.