Setting shader detail manually

#1 Thats pretty much two different things. An options level is of course supported, and could easily be used for normal thing like quality of textures. What TSE does, is attempt to use the best possible hardware method for the shaders themselves. Basically, (AFAIK) that just means choosing between shader versions 2.0, 1.1, etc. A low end card would never display something it can't, and a highend card will always be faster displaying low end (1.1) shaders. So to adjust that aspect yourself, is pretty much useless.

#2 TSE will set itself to use the best setting it detects. So if you have a ps 2.0 card, TSE will create ps 2.0 shaders. It is possible to set a specific level manually however, so if you want to force it to 1.1 shaders, that's possible. Forcing it to a shader level that your card doesn't support will cause rendering artifacts though, so you'll only want to force downwards.

#3 Thank you, this pretty much answered my questions. Of course, I wasn't thinking of adding this ability so that the user could try to push his card to a level it can't reach - it's rather the opposite. Having the ability to lower shader level if one experiences bad performance on higher settings is always useful.