According to one of the game's tech leads Jack Mathews, the way the developers were able to keep the game at 60 FPS with four different visors was to make one visor the "baseline," and make sure the others perform as well or better, with tech or design:

• The baseline for all the other visors is the Combat Visor, which provides an unmolested view of the world. It has Samus' Arm Cannon, lightmaps, and allows for plenty of combat. In Mathews' opinion, it's the most beautiful visor, because it's the one the player sees the most.

• The Scan Visor has the baseline elements of the Combat Visor, plus more UI, markers, a zoom window, etc., but it doesn't have the Arm Cannon, projectiles, and their lights. All that performance goes to the visor, which is why everything seen through the scanning window has a low quality blur. According to Mathews, the design of the visor needed a slightly zoomed scan window, but they didn't have the performance to re-render everything or render at a higher resolution, so they just did a digital zoom which blurs things.

• The Thermal Visor does have combat and particles, so the visor's performance comes from the lack of static lightmaps. All world lighting is turned off, and the post-process filters are just a palette lookup. The palette used for the visor was created offline. "Hot" objects used the Z component of the screen-space normal. "Cold" objects used the red component of their albedo texture.

• The X-Ray Visor (created by programmer Ted Chauviere) also has combat and lets the player see through enemies and Samus' Arm Cannon. Everything else, while purported by the game to be see-through in the visor, is essentially the same, and "invisible" objects are just models turned on and off. They also rendered with a white-to-black "fog" so they don't need to render far-away objects, and it's rendered at a lower resolution and blurred. The details of how this fog works involves obscuring the main view and showing depth buffer and normals/normalmaps only (with some trickery for invisible objects), but according to Mathews converting the GameCube depth buffer to something linear on the GPU was extremely expensive, on top of there being no normal maps on the GameCube.

• The Morph Ball Camera also essentially works as a visor, but instead of gun and particles, world shadows are projected on the ball surface (this effect was created by fellow lead technical engineer Andy O'Neal), a projected shadow under the ball, and a constant dynamic light.