well you see i knew, but if what you say about game companys having a farm to compile them its true then the new pixel shaders have taken an exponential jump on compile time... cause a pair of months ago when i toyed with the DXSDK, rendermonkey and Cg the compilation times were negligible... Anyways, even if compilation time has risen exponentially, librarys of precompiled effects can be made... dont you think so?

take SSS faking on a hardware shader... got the example, breezed trough the code... (admitedly didnt understand most of it...) hit compile... wait a pair of seconds, hit preview: the supplied model of a butterfly works perfect, hunt for the model name on the code, substitute for my own .x hit compile, one second, hit preview: black... read the comments... oh a map of how much the light goes trough the model has to be pregenerated... THAT took 14 minutes to pregenerate with a tool supplied...

My problem still is managing to integrate .fx(s) on my render pipeline in a way that is useful...

the fact that .fx are just text files that are complied on realtime by the cg dll and can be previwed almost instantly even on the maya work window leads me to think that (at least "old tech") shaders take very little power to compile

whats more: the fact that you can go to the nicely labeled "shaders" folder of DOOM3/battlefield2, etc open the files in there with a text editor and read (altough understand/modify is another matter enterly) the code leds me to believe STRONGLY that it doesnt takes so much to complie even on modern engines...