(because large parts of the chip shut off).
I know that the shaders are used to do the hashing, but is it possible to utilize more of the chip, even if it were at dramatically lower efficiency?
No. I already tried to abuse the texture/memory fetch units, but couldn't figure out a useful way of doing it. Its all fixed function hardware and its not particularly interesting for what we do. Although, I may go try that again, SDK 2.6 seems to be a much better compiler in some areas.