This is what's pushing those 3D pixels.
The Nintendo 3DS is official as of this past E3, and even though we don't have pricing or availability yet, we've learned a little bit about what's inside the plastic casing.
Early rumors had Nvidia's Tegra inside Nintendo's upcoming handheld, but it's been now revealed that it's a GPU from Digital Media Professionals called the Pica200.
The specifications for it are as follows, according to 1UP:
- Frame buffer: Maximum 4095x4095 pixels
- Pixel format: RGBA4444, RGB565, RGBA5551, RGBA8888
- Vertex program (ARB_vertex_program)
- Render to texture
- Mipmap
- Bilinear texture filtering
- Alpha blending
- Full-scene antialiasing (2x2)
- Polygon offset
- 8-bit stencil buffer
- 24-bit depth buffer
- Single/Double/Triple buffer
- Vertex performance: Maximum 15.3M polygons/sec (at 200MHz)
- Pixel performance: Maximum 800M pixels/sec (at 200MHz)
- DMP MAESTRO technology: per-pixel lighting, procedural texture, refraction mapping, subdivision primitive, shadow, gaseous object rendering
Want to see what this little GPU is capable of rendering? Check out the video below:
DMP's Pica200 GPU is Behind Nintendo 3DS
My only issue with this damn thing is, with all the other DSes' (whatever) is that they pack all these new features, but they still play the same DS games, except for those handful of games that take advantage of those few new features.
Seriously Nintendo, just call it something else. This thing looking like it has some potential, don't **** it up like the other DS "revisions".
Yes, this is a complete new console. The only relationship to DS games it has is backwards compatibility. New 3DS games will not run on a DS and actually come on a whole new card format.
3DS is to DS as PS3 is to PS2
As far as specs go for the GPU, you also have to remember that the screen has an effective resolution of 400x240 which is only 96000 pixels. A computer GPU has to scale up to 2560x1600 which is over 4 million pixels. So you can do a LOT with these hardware specs at the 3DS resolution.
Judging by the video, I would say it looks like Xbox-1 level graphics, so maybe a Geforce 4 Ti.
So at only 16/32-bit pixel depths, and a max buffer size of 4k*4k... That means it can access 32MB of frame buffer memory. That's not TERRIBLE, but I do hope that the 3DS winds up with more total memory than that.
As far as capabilities go... DMP is kinda opaque about the thing, offering not a whole lot more than the canned copy-paste that Toms' has here... (along with every other friggin' site on the Internet) Though they HAVE all missed a few details. Apparently, the Pica-200 does NOT actually have a large array of dedicated programmable pixel shader units; it may have one or more, but a lot of it relies on hard-coded "fixed-purpose" shaders built into the GPU. So, to sum it up, this appears to be the sort of graphics horsepower we're looking at:
-4 ROPs
-4 texturing units (assumed)
-Fixed-function hardware T&L unit (approximately 1 vertex per 3 clock cycles)
-32MB+ of RAM
-Fixed-function pixel shaders, capable of a few standard effects (phong shading+normal maps, shadow-maps, reflection/refraction shaders
The above is all a big step up from the DS, and definitely leapfrogs well beyond the capabilities of the PSP, but more specifics are quite up in the air; the figures being given are for a 200MHz version of the GPU, while no information on the clock rate used in the 3DS is given. Similarly, the amount of RAM remains unknown, as does the CPU itself.
WAY too much difference in design. Cards like that rely heavily on programmability; that's the whole thing that DirectX does. Plus, we're not talking anything remotely that new; after all, the PS3's GPU is based on the GeForce 7x00 series.
It's better to roughly compare it to consoles, and/or what sort of games it could do. The original DS was closer to roughly the level of what the PS1 could do, or a game like Quake on the PC, (albeit at a low resolution) while the PSP was more akin to the N64 (albeit with a lot more RAM) and gaming capabilities more akin to, say, Half-Life.
Provided the capabilities of the GPU, this looks something somewhere between the power of the Game Cube, to as much as the original Xbox; so we could possibly see games as advanced as, say, the original Halo: Combat Evolved. If Nintendo does give it at least 32MB of RAM and a clock rate near 200 MHz, then it'd definitely put the original GC to shame.
Nah, still dominated by kiddy games...
that is a terrible analogy... most ps3's DON'T play ps2 games, where the 3ds will play ALL ds games =]
...if you recall the n64 was pretty much dominated by kiddy games too... they were good kiddy games though
This would be similar to an old ATI X800. Then again, you can't really compare them.
On a small screen, I'll wager the illusion of depth is more impressive than 720p resolution with bloom effects.
I thought just a "slight" improve from the NDSi and i dont really like the design, but probably that's not a final product~
Along with 11-35 year olds you should add.
This has been the first DS(or gameboy since gameboy color) that has grabbed my attention and not because of the 3d effects.