Actually, all you would see without shaders on current hardware is the clear color. It's not about any cool effects (although a lot is possible), but about determining the vertex positions in clip space for the rasterizer and determining the fragment color for output.

The "fixed function pipeline" used by gamestudio when not assigning shaders is outdated for more than five years (at least 6, but I think it's even longer) and emulated with shaders in your graphics driver, as the ffp required special hardware for its tasks.