No 3DS Until March 2011; Design Could Change

Feedback: 960x640 screen, more TPS computations, and a second analog stick, please.

yeah another analog stick would be nice. And a functional browser and I am sold. I have not bought a nintendo handheld in a while, but i may buy this one.

Also, make it look less like a DS more like a PSP. I thought the PSP looked slick and DS kinda kiddy.

time to take that 3D technology to more then 3 inches of screen .. then you can call me.

Get rid of the different colours

what difference would that make? Limiting choice would only contribute to less sales. If you don't like a particular color, just buy it in a differet color, simple as that.

ya sure its nice to have a bigger screen and all, but would you really want to pay more for a hand held then a console and have it last less then a normal play time of battery life?

You cant just magically add screen size without boosting the hardware and power requirements for such a small device.

Add a kinetic momentum auxiliary charger. I'm serious that would help so much!

I think Nintendo should really splurge on this one. High end CPU, GPU, 4.3" Hi-Rez Screen on both. Sure, it would probably cost something like $500 or $600 per unit to manufacture, but sell it for $150 or so. Sure, Nintendo will lose massive money in the initial year or two, but they will rake that up with all the millions that this is going to guarantee sell. Besides, they still have like Gazillion Dollars from all the Wii sales, they can afford to take the back burner for a while. Basically, I would like to see Nintendo make some high end hardware device for once, and combine it with the innovative games they come up with.

seeing as we are all thinking up the ideal device with money being secondard, I agree a bigger hi rez main screen with minimum bezel would be better

I wish it were that way captainm27, but if they could, they'd just pull a "Wii" EVERY new hardware release....

My only problem is that the 3DS seems like a good competitor with the PSP (in terms of technology) not a successor to it like a lot would have hoped. The PSP kills the 3DS in terms of triangles computed per second. What does that mean? It means that more complicated geometry can be done on the PSP (or 'fewer jaggies').

The 3DS beats it in fill rate meaning the textures can be better though.

In my opinion, there are no good reasons to have old technology in a device. Newer technology can be cheaper to make, use less power, and get more performance. I really don't understand why Tegra 1 or Tegra 2 was not used. Or a similar type of chip.

Furthermore, the screen is a 400x240 screen (2x400x240 meaning there are two 400x240 images rendered to create the 3D effect... so Nintendo claims an 800x240 screen) is similar to the PSPs 480x270. More resolution = fewer jaggies.

Rumors are floating about that this device isn't going to come cheap. I would have rather passed on 3D this generation. While it might look really cool, it may end up being too expensive.

I'm really interested to see what the PSP2 can do even if I will have bought a 3DS already.

If you produce something for 500-600 dollars as you say, and sell it for $150, you never end up making money? What are you thinking?

I personally can't stand the black bezel on all the 3DS that aren't black.

Matte screens would be a plus too. Non of these super glossy screens that kick back awful reflections.

A more durable touch screen would be nice. Something akin to the glass touch screen on the iPhone. I've abused my DS screen so much over the years that when you touch the center of the screen, the cursor shows up half a centimeter to the right of where you're actually touching. I've tried recalibrating the thing to no avail.

feedback: don't make cost $50 more than the DSi XL

Both Sony and MS do exactly that, when the 360 and ps3 were released they were sold for less than the console cost to manufacture. The idea is to make it up on game licensing fees and the eventual cost reduction of the hardware as newer and better tech came out. Nintendo has never really followed that strategy though, they tend to use older and established (and significantly less expensive) hardware in their designs, which, considering the commercial success of the wii and ds, has seemed to work in their favor.

No kidding... have you taken any economic lessons? I wouldn't mind buying something like that though =]

Tell that to Sony, who tried that with their PS3. Or Microsoft, who did that with the original Xbox. While the Xbox 360 made a profit in spite of initially selling at a loss, it wasn't due to game sales, but rather the fact that the loss was small, and die shrinks and revisions quickly slashed into the cost of manufacture. On the other side, the Xbox 1 wound up being a huge, multi-hundred-million-dollar loss for Microsoft, and the PS3 likewise for Sony.

One must remember: these companies are in the business to make money, not to satisfy fans' dreams. And while some might argue for the "sell at a loss" gambit, a company as conservative and cautious as Nintendo is never going to take a risk like that, especially given the real-world results we've seen from this risk.



Actually, the on-paper specs don't mean so much there... Traingles-per-second really stopped mattering back after 2001 or so, when it was the main dick-waving contest between the PS2 and Xbox. Especially since this can't be done as a strict comparison: the PSP uses programmable resources for T&L, while the 3DS has a fixed-function T&L unit. What does this mean? It means that SURE, the PSP can jack up the number of polys, but it drains resources away that could be used for other effects, or the came core itself, while the 3DS may have a lower theoretical limit on polys, it can pretty much always run at that limit without strangling other parts of the system.

The texturing power, though, indeed blows the altnernatives away. Some rumors seem to be in line with the GPU actually clocking at MORE than the baseline 200 MHz, giving it fill-rates that could allow for detail levels that'd rival modern 7th-generation consoles. (once difference of resolution are accounted for) Indeed, some of the E3 demonstrations seem to bear this out; the GPU can apparently handle all the common shaders popular in Xbox 360 and PS3 games (normal-, specular-, and shadow-mapping among others) for essentially free, as they're handled through fixed-function units built into each texture unit, rather than relying on real-time computations done by programming the pixel shaders. The only commonly-seen thing it seems to lack is support for are bloom/HDR.



I'm not 100% positive, but it does appear the 3DS has something arguing strongly in its favor for lower jaggies: the use of anti-aliasing. That alone can do far more than a resolution bump, so while the effective 400x240 of the 3DS may be technically lower than the 480x272 of the PSP, the images should appear vastly sharper and crisper.

No word on the price, though Nintendo isn't one for vastly high costs, nor do they sell their hardware at a loss. $200-250 is more liable to be the price range for this sort of thing, I'd guess. The latter seems a bit high, but mostly I don't know how Nintendo's going to have this play along with the $190 DSi XL; the latter *IS* much bigger, but they may opt to slash the price on it. I suppose it might be helpful to do some research on price history of previous handhelds, since Nintendo has invariably kept their old generation along as a "cheaper alternative" to their current one. (I.e, GBC when the GBA was out, GBA alongside the DS, DS Lite and DSi, etc.)

I'd get one if it gets 5" 3D screen, and latest CPU/GPU tech.

As far as I know, all the E3 game demos shown were real time in game demonstrations running live on 3DS engineering units. They were not pre-rendered videos. The demos themselves weren't playable, but in many cases attendees could pan the camera around while the demo was running. Yes, so that means Kid Icarus, Resident Evil, MGS and all other demos were running live.

For everyone disappointed in the PICA200... The specs given in this article apply to this particular GPU running at 200MHz. The PICA200 in the 3DS is running at 400MHz. So the capabilities of the 3DS are quite a bit different, and in many ways it does outperform the PSP (at least on paper). I don't know about anyone else, but it wasn't too difficult for me to figure this out on my own just based off the in game demo vids available online. MGS on the 3DS looked on par or even better then the PS2 version, and much better then on the PSP.

The vertex performance of the 3DS is 30.6 million triangles per second, and the pixel performance is 1.6 billion pixels per second. And of course the GPU still includes all the features mentioned above, some of which are not available on the PSP, such as full-scene antialiasing, per-pixel lighting, refraction mapping, shadow, etc...

While the vertex performance of the 3DS is slightly below that of the PSP, the pixel fillrate is 2.5x that of the PSP. This is probably where most of the visual discrepancies between the two systems come from. Think also about how much games have advanced visually over the past 5 to 6 years, and consider that the vast majority of those visual advances were born out of expanded pixel horsepower and not vertex.

Do not forget: the Thing needs to run on batteries!!!

[citation][nom]Think also about how much games have advanced visually over the past 5 to 6 years, and consider that the vast majority of those visual advances were born out of expanded pixel horsepower and not vertex.[/citation]

Not much really! I'm disappointed by current graphics. It's too expensive to make and it has not advanced much since DX9 which was 2003???

Yeah! Games need much more polys! Much, much more polys and much higher resolution screens at 60fps! And eventually raytracing. Then you can speak about better graphics.
In my opinion graphics and games have stalled.

Higher resolution is what makes jaggies less obvious. Anti-aliasing is workaround and makes the image blurry. What would you prefer 128x antialiasing or 600dpi screen? I'd get the latter

"These are things that we’re looking to get reaction to, including the overall button placement. When we get all that feedback, then we’ll finalize the design."

Button placement? I pity Nintendo for having such a tough job.

I love the way Nintendo really warms up their laurels with their butts.

Because a perfectly smooth, sleek looking clamshell portable game system is so "Kiddy Looking" right? The people who call everything nintendo kiddy are the ones being so childish.

And do what sony does with the playstation 3? i don't think so, I think Nintendo has the winning method this time.

You have no idea of the 3DS specs, since NO ONE KNOW THEM. How the hell do you know that the PSP renders more polygons than the 3DS? BTW, have you seen Metal Gear on 3DS? Completelly smokes any PSP game you have.

Some people mentioned the resolution of this being slightly low compared to PSP. With a screen this size the difference wouldn't be noticeable at all. The resolutions are so close that I doubt it would be noticable on a 10 inch screen.

Nintendo: Get rid of the low res 3D screen and but at least a 4' high res (800x480) screen that isnt highly reflective so we can use the thing somewhere besides a dark room!!!!!!

3D will limit your audience and implementation too much and if its the reason for the small low res screen then GET RID OF IT!!! This isnt 2000 anymore and a sub 300 pixel hieght resolution isnt going to cut it.

Yes, Nintendo, listen to what we have to say through Tom's Hardware (I hope you do read Tom's Hardware!). I too would like that 2ndary right thumb-slider to play something like Red Dead Revolver on 3DS.

Though I agree on the base point, it's worth noting that the HCW Article that gives the 400 MHz figure is speculative in nature; the reasoning given is that since the release of the initial 200 MHz version, later versions in 2008 apparently scaled to at least 400 MHz. Similarly, TDP was reported to scale with clock rate, to equate to approximately 1 mW per MHz, at which 0.4 W for the GPU was considered reasonable. While I can't find a figure for the GPU itself, I found that the PSP's main CPU (which handles a good portion of the graphics load) has a TDP of 0.5 W, so I'd venture that with a full-acceleration GPU like the 3DS, 0.4 W wouldn't be unreasonable at all.



This somewhat gets at the point, though really, in the modern world of graphics, pixel fillrates are an almost meaningless figure, as memory bandwidth tends to be the bottleneck there. (i.e, a GPU's pixel fillrate is usually restricted to fit within whatever bandwidth is available)

The real point I went on is that the PICA200 has a fixed-function T&L unit; for those reading that are unfamiliar, before we got "stream processors," these things were called vertex shader units, or "hardware T&L units" and were a big deal when nVidia first brought them to PCs with the first GeForce 256 card. By contrast, the PSP has a dirty little secret: The CPU has to handle T&L. So in order to hit that trumpeted 33 million polys/sec, the PSP has to basically stop most of what else it's doing.

You are right on that the major advantage the 3DS has over the PSP's GPU is in capabilities; the latter is basically little more than an old 1990s Voodoo; it handles texturing and render output, and that's about it; it's very limited on effects. While not programmable, the PICA200 has a wide array of fixed-function units, that essentially allow a certain (of unknown limit, since I can't find low-level details) amount of such shader effects to be done for essentially free, contrast to programmable pixel-shader GPUs, (like all desktop as well as the Xbox, 360, and PS3) which have to eat up tons of built-in math power and often hit lag spikes when they run out.

In this case, the 3DS' main bottleneck may very well be texture fillrate; each extra pass with another shader, such as refraction, specular lighting, or normal-maps is going to require another texture pass to apply it to the surface. So programmers may wind up having to budget, or at least be careful they don't throw all these effects out willy-nilly. While all of this will also require a degree of pixel overdraw, I think that with only 192k pixels to render to, even the low-end 800 megapixels/sec would be utter overkill. (given that even @60fps, that's enough to draw each entire frame over nearly 70 times)



First, it wasn't necessary to quote a giant comment to give a brief 4-sentence reply. But also, you are incorrect; anti-aliasing makes the image look realistic, and yes, it removes "jaggies." Take a look at real-world photos: do you see jagged edges? No, you see many pixels at edges that blend the colors of the foreground and background objects. By contrast, in rendering, upping the resolution doesn't remove the stair-step jaggies whatsoever. Plus, with any display technology, you can only make cell walls so thin, so the higher your pixel density, the more glaring the edges of each pixel will be; crank the density high enough and it becomes as if you're looking through a screen door.

I smell virtual boy.

I can't recall the last time Nintendo released something that was "high end" in relation to tech that was available. They release it at a price that gets it into kids hands and let word of mouth spread it to the masses.

How long did it take them to add color display to their portables? At least this time they are jumping into a new technology milestone with 3D capability. It would be unlike them to sell it at a loss so they have to make cuts (screen size) to keep it in the target price point.