The PS2 was actually kind of ahead of its time in this regard, with programmable vector units right there in the middle of the rendering pipeline; you could ac

The PS2 was actually kind of ahead of its time in this regard, with programmable vector units right there in the middle of the rendering pipeline; you could actually write the equivalent of vertex shaders and even simple geometry shaders *long* before those were available on standard home GPUs. (although you had to code them in assembly) No fragment shaders, though, it's true.