> You could almost treat the DSPs as the compute units of modern GPU architectures: they definitely processed the vertices, and nothing stops you from adding a "vertex shader" pass, however, because it's not directly integrated into the graphics pipeline, it's harder to emulate a true pixel shader, you might be limited to full-screen pixel shading since there's no feedback from the rasteriser about which pixels exactly get written to memory.

Actually, you could probably just use the depth buffer as write-only with constant values to identify objects as different kinds, and use a "pixel shader" pass to apply effects on those annotated pixels, but I assume this might be a pretty expensive technique.

... Now that I think about it, it's not unlike modern rendering engines.