perhaps you are missunderstanding what was meant.
The HL2 engine has no pure rendering core, as even the newest Q4 iteration does not have.
They have fixed pipeline core + shaders for visuals.
The only shooter thats pure shader and really uses it is crysis most likely (not sure of the DX9 version thought) and any DX10 game naturally as DX10 has no FFP anymore.
Other games are world in conflict and supreme commander.
But most games actually do FFP + shaders for visuals, not shaders even for basic world transformation etc.
too power consuming and on its own already enough to kill 300 series cards (intel is out directly, its bandwidth already has problems keeping the stream up for pixel shader based multi stage materials) if you want to add even lower end SM2 shaders people see as "normal" for a few years now.
The HL2 engine has no pure rendering core, as even the newest Q4 iteration does not have.
They have fixed pipeline core + shaders for visuals.
The only shooter thats pure shader and really uses it is crysis most likely (not sure of the DX9 version thought) and any DX10 game naturally as DX10 has no FFP anymore.
Other games are world in conflict and supreme commander.
But most games actually do FFP + shaders for visuals, not shaders even for basic world transformation etc.
too power consuming and on its own already enough to kill 300 series cards (intel is out directly, its bandwidth already has problems keeping the stream up for pixel shader based multi stage materials) if you want to add even lower end SM2 shaders people see as "normal" for a few years now.