[ruined]

gcn games never anticipated shader compilation time because it didn't exist.

shaders weren't a thing when the gcn released. it may be arguable, but nobody even used the word at the time. shader compilation time is an issue for modern games on the PC, and because of this, developers anticipate and work around it.

on the gcn, specialized fixed-function pipelines were available, and could be composed by some limited configuration (literally, 24 instructions). you may think of this as a sort of proto-shader, but significantly, the fixed-function pipelines embody quite a lot of behavior in specialized and limited hardware that is now typically achieved in software on more versatile hardware.

so, to replicate that specialized hardware, modern graphics hardware (which exposes its greater capability as simple computational primitives) must compile a shader program and run it. but on gcn, the tiny configuration of static hardware loads near-instantly.

[pjmlp]

Shaders as concept exists since 1980's,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RenderMan_Shading_Language

Just two examples, SIGGRAPH has plenty of paper on the subject.

[OCASMv2]

A 2002 postmortem on the tech of Rogue Leader, a Gamecube launch title, already using the term "shaders":

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/shader-integration...

[shzhdbi09gv8ioi]

The first video card with a programmable pixel shader was the Nvidia GeForce 3 (NV20), released in 2001. [1]

1: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/nvidia-nv20.g644