Mario Galaxy shown at GDC

[shams]

yorch said: One note about Wii graphics. Nintendo in association with ATI patented a technology which can "simulate" polygons. It was like a "volumetric" texture. Hard to explain for me, I don't remember the name of the technology (and my english isn't that good either). I saw a photo, it was a ground texture, like asphalt in tiles. Before the application of the render, it was a plain texture, after, tiles were elevated from the ground, attending to the lights and shadows of the texture.

I don't know too much about it, but its basically a special (custom) pixel shader. Similar to normal mapping, except I think its even more useful/powerful.