Comment by phire

The gamecube had a completely fixed function vertex pipeline (though, only a few N64 games used custom μcode. For the rest, it might has well been fixed function, and was had less functionality than the gamecube)

But per-vertex lighting was kind of old and boring by even 1995, it massively limited your art style. You really wanted per-pixel lighting.

The GameCube's vertex pipeline was very fixed function, but its Pixel pipeline was quite programmable. Far more programmable than the N64. It was basically equivalent to the Xbox's pixel shaders, more advanced in some ways. But because it wasn't exposed with the pixel shader programming model, many people don't consider it to be "programmable" at all.

*And in many ways, you shouldn't consider the xbox and other DirectX 8.0 shaders to be fully programmable. You were limited to 8-16 instructions, with no control flow at all. On the gamecube, instead of 8-16 instructions, you had 16 stages, each being equivalent to an instruction. The N64 had just two stages, which were less flexible. True Fixed function pixel pipelines (like on the PS1, PS2 or Dreamcast) have just a single stage, and very little configurability.

Those "texture tricks" are per-pixel lighting. Many of them aren't possible on fixed function GPUs like the PS2, they required both textures and a reasonably programmable pixel pipeline.

Even today, most per-pixel lighting is done with a mix of textures and shaders.