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Super Mario Galaxy ran on the Wii, which had a GPU that is very different from modern GPUs (and very different from even the GPUs of other consoles in that gene

Super Mario Galaxy ran on the Wii, which had a GPU that is very different from modern GPUs (and very different from even the GPUs of other consoles in that generation i.e. Xbox 360 and PS3). I'm not sure whether using normal maps was feasible/efficient on it.

masklinn 4y ago
According to the wiki, the PS2 was the only console of the 6th gen to lack hardware normal mapping (and that’s including the Dreamcast), and all the 7th gen supported it.
dogma1138 4y ago
The GPU on the Wii supports normal mapping and bump mapping, even the OG Xbox and the Dreamcast and most importantly the Gamecube did. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/guide/1786/gamecube-faq-ngc-graphical-abilities https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/guide/1786/gamecube-faq-... Quite often it’s not even a question of the GPU itself but the development pipeline and the tooling used. As well as ofc does the engine itself supports it. Also at the end of the day your GPU has finite amount of compute resources many of them are shared across various stages of the rendering pipeline even back at the 6th and 7th gen of consoles where fixed function units were far more common. In fact in many cases even back then if you used more traditional “fixed function pipelines” the driver would still convert things into shaders e.g. hardware T&L even on the Wii was probably done by a vertex shader. Many teams especially in companies that focus far more on gameplay than visuals opted out for simpler pipelines that have fewer variables to manage. It’s much easier to manage the frame budget if you only need to care about how many polygons and textures you use, as if the performance is too low you can reduce the complexity of models or number/size of textures. Shaders and more advanced techniques require far more fine grain optimization especially once you get into deferred or multi pass rendering. So this isn’t hardware, it’s that the team behind it either didn’t want or didn’t need to leverage the use of normal mapping to achieve their design goals.
- monocasa 4y ago
  > e.g. hardware T&L even on the Wii was probably done by a vertex shader. Nope, no vertex shaders on the Wii, just a hardware T&L unit with no code upload feature.
nwallin 4y ago
The Wii's GPU did indeed have a fixed function pipeline, but that fixed function pipeline did support normal mapping. ("dot3 bump mapping" as was the style at the time.) However, the Wii's GPU only had 1MB of texture cache. So it was generally preferable to do more work with geometry than with textures. Some exec from Nintendo is on record as saying something along the lines that texture mapping looks bad and should be avoided. My conspiracy theory is that it was a conscious decision at Nintendo to limit the ability of its consoles to do stuff with textures. The N64 was even worse, a lot worse: it only had 4kB of texture cache.

masklinn 4y ago

According to the wiki, the PS2 was the only console of the 6th gen to lack hardware normal mapping (and that’s including the Dreamcast), and all the 7th gen supported it.

dogma1138 4y ago

The GPU on the Wii supports normal mapping and bump mapping, even the OG Xbox and the Dreamcast and most importantly the Gamecube did. https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/guide/1786/gamecube-faq-ngc-graphical-abilities https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/guide/1786/gamecube-faq-... Quite often it’s not even a question of the GPU itself but the development pipeline and the tooling used. As well as ofc does the engine itself supports it. Also at the end of the day your GPU has finite amount of compute resources many of them are shared across various stages of the rendering pipeline even back at the 6th and 7th gen of consoles where fixed function units were far more common. In fact in many cases even back then if you used more traditional “fixed function pipelines” the driver would still convert things into shaders e.g. hardware T&L even on the Wii was probably done by a vertex shader. Many teams especially in companies that focus far more on gameplay than visuals opted out for simpler pipelines that have fewer variables to manage. It’s much easier to manage the frame budget if you only need to care about how many polygons and textures you use, as if the performance is too low you can reduce the complexity of models or number/size of textures. Shaders and more advanced techniques require far more fine grain optimization especially once you get into deferred or multi pass rendering. So this isn’t hardware, it’s that the team behind it either didn’t want or didn’t need to leverage the use of normal mapping to achieve their design goals.

monocasa 4y ago
> e.g. hardware T&L even on the Wii was probably done by a vertex shader. Nope, no vertex shaders on the Wii, just a hardware T&L unit with no code upload feature.

nwallin 4y ago

The Wii's GPU did indeed have a fixed function pipeline, but that fixed function pipeline did support normal mapping. ("dot3 bump mapping" as was the style at the time.) However, the Wii's GPU only had 1MB of texture cache. So it was generally preferable to do more work with geometry than with textures. Some exec from Nintendo is on record as saying something along the lines that texture mapping looks bad and should be avoided. My conspiracy theory is that it was a conscious decision at Nintendo to limit the ability of its consoles to do stuff with textures. The N64 was even worse, a lot worse: it only had 4kB of texture cache.