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.nintendoworl

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.