Currently I am trying to make some shader textures for a game and I am using perlin noise to do so, each time I get a noise value, it adds about 730 instructions to the shader, how many instructions should i aim for?
What video cards would support 10,000+ instructions? Is this a issue at all? Using NumMathInstructionSlots to change the default may cause compatibility issues?
I suggest moving as much as you can to the vertex shader -- you might want to look through the old NVIDAI shader library for some samples http://developer.download.nvidia.com/shaderlibrary/webpages/shader_library.html -- look at "vbomb" as an example.