Is there an alternative to the Normal from Height node?

[errant salmon]

I am making a project based off of early versions of Universe Sandbox (Alpha 12 to be exact) and I need the planet surface rendering finished first before I can get into the more complex stuff like avoiding floating point issues, and I need an alternative to the infamous and unsampled Normal from Height, I have attached the node setup in the 2nd image.

guh

[ebon horizon]

The alternative is a normal map

Maybe it could be blurred by sampling multiple times but that'd be inaccurate and wasteful

Much better to generate the normal map offline, when you can use all kinds of image filtering to improve the result
Or use the height to displace a mesh and bake that to a normal map alternatively
Both produce a normal map texture but with different advantages