Ok lets fix this mess once and for all.
PLEASE NEOGAF DONT USE THE WORD SHADERS EVER AGAIN.
Ok the DS has "shader supoourt" it has a built in per pixel toon shader, then you might say why cant it do bumpmapping?.
Well if you wire special circuitry you can do anything really fast, thats why ipod's dont need powerful cpu's they have specialised decoding chips (same case with the ds toon shader). The down side is the hardware circuits can only do a limited range of things.
However if you have what is called "Shader Hardware"(the stuff in pc's xbox ps3 etc..) it actually means you have the ability to write programs that utilise smaller less specialised circuits on the gpu. These programs run independtly of the cpu, they utilise opcodes or commands that are wired in the hardware but the whole program is not wired it is excuted, so its not as fast as a pre built circuit but at the same time it is faster that computing everything in software mode and not utilising any hardware (specialised hardware that is)
what gamecube and wii have is the TEV, Gamecube and the wii DO NOT have programmable gpu's and thus the comments about the lack of shaders. SO YES gamecube and wii dont have the "shaders" because shaders insatnatly might mean programmable gpus. what they do have is the ability to do perfragment operations (per pixel) and thus they can look like "shaders" even though the fragments are modified by specialised circuits like the ones in the (pc xbox etc...) the sequence of opcodes does not run on the gpu (thus they are unprogrammable). The perpixel commands are issued from the cpu(wii gc), so does the whole "shading program", so that explains the comments about GPU(wii gc) being completely fixed function. So (wii,gc) "shading power" is governed by 2 things , how fast the cpu does the "shaders" and the fact most shaders take allot of ram since they use several textures. Wii,gc cpu has specialised math circuits (dot, mult devide etc...) so its math performance can match the math performance of a completly programmable gpu, its gc's ram that sucked)
So in esscence wii and gc are shaded by the cpu, this means the shaders are very flexible and are easily interfaced with the rest of the game since both the "shader" and the game are written in the same language and are running on the same cpu.
However the wii/gc will never have newer shaders since the maic happens on the cpu(cpu code is as flexible as you want but slower than gpu code(pc xbox etc..) if you ignore the use of gc's math hardware on the cpu) , which eventually calls a handful of fixed function calls that modify the fragments on the gpu
i havent proof read this so i hope it makes sense
