| tk1989 said: Wii could never handle sumfin like GOW less HD, first off the wii doesnt have any shader support (if i remember correctly, or its pretty basic shader support, one of the two).... |
It's not certain if it has standard shaders like Pixel Shader 2.0 or 4.0 whatever the 360 has but it does have a form of shader effects from its TEV. This forum discussion from 2002 about the Flipper covers the differences http://forum.beyond3d.com/archive/index.php/t-1086.html
The key part is: "The TEV and "pixel shaders" are basically cute acronyms for what used to be called color combiners. The TEV also incorporates the Texture reading part of the pipeline.
A color combiner is in general implemented as a single logic op, in NVidia's case thats public (register combiner docs) and is of the form
A op1 B op2 C op1 D
where op1 is either Dot Product or multiply, op2 is either add or select.
As you can see by repeating this multiple times with some register manipulation between stages you can do most basic math. Pixel shaders just provide a simple consistent interface to this (and other vendors implementations).
The TEV uses a different basic combine operation which is a little more limited. However since the Texture reads can be interleaved with the combiner operations it allows you to do things that would require multipass render on NV2X."
Normal Mapping has been done on the Wii which the GameCube couldn't do so something was added to Hollywood. I've read that the Wii can also do displacement mapping before but I haven't heard anything more about that. As to Gears of War, it should be doable even without shaders. It won't look as good even in EDTV comparison is all.
