| curl-6 said: I said Gamecube didn't have programmable pixel shaders. It used a fixed function shader pipeline. While it could do normal mapping to a limited degree, (as we saw in games like Rogue Squadron 2 and 3, and later in Conduit 1 & 2 and Metroid Other M on Wii) you couldn't spam it all over the place the way PS3/360/Wii U tend to. If we look at the Titania stage in Zero, the way the sandy terrain is covered in normal + specular maps is something you just couldn't do on Gamecube. And is there even a single case of a Gamecube game rendering internally at HD? Even if it could, it cannot output the image, so the fact that Zero outputs at 720p on the main screen puts it beyond the reach of the Gamecube. |
Then it's not a shader by definition since they are programmable units ... 
What the Gamecube has is a pre-cursor to programmable pixel shader like the TEV units or what Nvidia calls register combiner's ...
There's other ways to do normal mapping via multiple passes like Pemalite pointed out but that's not useful since it eats up tons of bandwidth alive but the PS2 certainly did it that way when it had 4MB of extremely fast eDRAM on the GS ...
Even if you can't output in 720p it was still useful to render at higher resolution since you were practically supersampling the image ...
