Thats a very interesting demo. My problem with using per pixel lighting and more sophisticated techniques is with the lights. Most shaders only support one light which makes scenes very dark and unnatural. To have more natural scenes we need at least one extra ambient light (or support for lightmaps) that works as the fill light for dark areas and at least two more lights. If it can calculate those lights in a single pass then it’s a great speed advantage for older cards.
The OGRE wiki has a shader that does 3 lights in a single pass with normal mapping but nothing else:
ogre3d.org/wiki/index.php/Pe … ighting_II