3DS got two ARM11s

My suspicion is that the parallax barrier is always in place. So enabling 2D mode simply sends the same image to both eyes. Requiring developers to target two separate resolutions is just an extra unnecessary headache.
Highly unlikely.
 
My suspicion is that the parallax barrier is always in place. So enabling 2D mode simply sends the same image to both eyes. Requiring developers to target two separate resolutions is just an extra unnecessary headache.

What does that have to do with vertical resolution? If they're using 800x480 it'd be bad not to let developers use the 480 under any circumstances.

Putting in some pixel doubling hardware in either direction is probably not that much work for Nintendo, so they could make it optional. Otherwise, supporting two different resolutions isn't very much work at all, just multiply all the coordinates by two (could probably be done in the viewport setup); the extra framebuffer space you'd need would come for free from consolidating the two field framebuffers.

Tweaking assets to best fit two resolutions would be work, but designing for the lower resolution and allowing for the higher w/o any tweaking is a lot better than just being stuck at the lower.
 
Highly unlikely.

Why is that? Capcom have demonstrated images from the 2D mode of their game (the shots with motion blur which is currently not working in S3D mode) and they were the same 400x240 resolution as all the rest.


What does that have to do with vertical resolution? If they're using 800x480 it'd be bad not to let developers use the 480 under any circumstances.
.

If the GPU's performance is utterly crippled when trying to push that amount of pixels, I don't think that's the case at all. 800x480 LCD panels are cheap and plentiful but 800x240 panels with rectangular pixels are something I've never seen on any spec. sheet and Sharp's parallax barrier display is indeed listed as a 800x480 screen in 2D mode which is capable of halving both the vertical and horizontal resolution in order to support stereo3D.

If using a higher resolution panel is cheaper and less prone to supply issues then I don't see why Nintendo would be averse to using one even if the hardware doesn't make use of every pixel the display has to offer.

Either way, I don't see any game targeting any resolution other than 400x240 whether its exclusively 2D or not, Nintendo will encourage developers to use the excess throughput for stuff like AA which they're already doing.
 
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Why is that? Capcom have demonstrated images from the 2D mode of their game (the shots with motion blur which is currently not working in S3D mode) and they were the same 400x240 resolution as all the rest.
I doubt that's the explanation for those images. It is somply not justified for games that normally run in stereoscopic mode to switch to true 2D mode just when somebody moved the 3D slider all the way down. That would imply an arbitrary-complex GPU and VRAM re-initialisation across frames, etc. And this is before any ergonomic considertations of whether or not the user would actually want to see a switch of resolution mid-game just because they moved the slider a mm futher than they intended.
 
I doubt that's the explanation for those images. It is somply not justified for games that normally run in stereoscopic mode to switch to true 2D mode just when somebody moved the 3D slider all the way down. That would imply an arbitrary-complex GPU and VRAM re-initialisation across frames, etc. And this is before any ergonomic considertations of whether or not the user would actually want to see a switch of resolution mid-game just because they moved the slider a mm futher than they intended.

Well they're going to get increased AA and effects if they move it that extra mm, whether they want it or not. I don't see how changing the resolution with that final click is any different.
 
Well they're going to get increased AA and effects if they move it that extra mm, whether they want it or not.
That's not how properly designed human interfaces work. Continuous (i.e. analogue) controllers provide continuous effects. How many sound systems do you know that change from mono, to stereo, to surround, on an analogue input?

I don't see how changing the resolution with that final click is any different.
The difference is in the disruptive effect. While in practice that slider is most likely just another anaologue input meant for the games to act upon, I'd be really surprised if nintendo's game certification process allowed devs to use it any other way but as a smooth level-of-stereoscopy controller, at least for steresocopic titles.
 
That's not how properly designed human interfaces work. Continuous (i.e. analogue) controllers provide continuous effects. How many sound systems do you know that change from mono, to stereo, to surround, on an analogue input?

.


Well its how the 3D slider on the 3DS works, whether its logical or not. Its not as if Nintendo have never designed an analog interface with a digital component before (not remember the GCN's shoulder buttons?)

Sliding it all the way down enables 2D mode and in 2D mode Resident Evil: Revelations enables extra effects including AA and motion blur as confirmed by Capcom themselves. It may appear jarring, but it doensn't appear as though Nintendo are discouraging it at all. Personally I don't give a crap if someone finds the transition "jarring." That's not enough justification to keep developers from throwing the gamer a few extra goodies "for free" if they don't want to use the S3D effect.
 
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Yes, its consistently been just about the most expensive phone available since launch. On plans where a high end android phone will be free, you'll often have to cough up an extra £100+ upfront to secure an iPhone.

Here in the UK you can get a really fantastic midrange android (2.1) smartphone with a 3.5" 800x480 capacitive touch AMOLED screen, ~440MB RAM and 600mhz ARM11 for just £100 without any contract tied to it all. With that you're free to use a SIM only plan which offer much, much better inclusive minutes/texts/data at the same pricepoints (£10 is about equivalent to a £30 contract plan, data and all) which you can cancel any time you want. So yes, the iPhone does come with a huge premium here.

E.g. I can buy this midrange Android Smartphone for £100:

http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/San-Francisco-from-Orange-in-grey

Then signup for one of these super cheap calls+text+ 1GB data packages from as little as £10 per month:

http://threestore.three.co.uk/simonly.aspx

And then I'm never tied to a lengthy contract and can upgrade/downgrade/cancel my call package whenever I like. I'd have to pay £30 a month for a minimum of 24 months (even if I can't afford it later on) with an iPhone and still pay roughly an extra £100 upfront. The iPhone would end up costing me at least £600 extra by the end of the contract and I'd be screwed if my circumstances changed mid contract, yeah, I'll stick with a PAYG Android handset, thanks.

Interesting, that Orange-branded Android phone is completely unlocked?

I could walk in and just buy that for 99 Pounds, probably root it and run some kind of Wifi hotspot software and it will be around the price of a Mifi.

Doesn't list the processor speed or battery capacity.

Would be nice if an HTC or some other known brands get down to that level.
 
Sliding it all the way down enables 2D mode and in 2D mode Resident Evil: Revelations enables extra effects including AA and motion blur as confirmed by Capcom themselves. It may appear jarring, but it doensn't appear as though Nintendo are discouraging it at all. Personally I don't give a crap if someone finds the transition "jarring." That's not enough justification to keep developers from throwing the gamer a few extra goodies "for free" if they don't want to use the S3D effect.

Did Capcom actually say that "2D mode" on their titles was activated by moving the slider all the way down instead of picking an option from a menu? Because they easily could have done that. Talking about the inclusion of "2D mode only extras" when speaking of the slider's functionality is missing the point.
 
Yes, it's in our best interests that companies push technology forward, that's pretty much tautological

The way you and Darkblu put it, it is an absolute statement. A statement of faith, if you wish.

It is only in our best interests if
A, we reap tangible benefits
B, there are no drawbacks or (hidden) costs involved.

If any one or both of the above two points aren't fulfilled, advancing technology is at best debatable, or worse, a negative.
In the specific case of Nintendos choice of CPUs, as far as I can see, both items are open to question.
 
The way you and Darkblu put it, it is an absolute statement. A statement of faith, if you wish.
I don't know how my posts in this thread came out as techno-absolutist, as I actually agree with the rest of your post.

It is only in our best interests if
A, we reap tangible benefits
B, there are no drawbacks or (hidden) costs involved.

If any one or both of the above two points aren't fulfilled, advancing technology is at best debatable, or worse, a negative.
In the specific case of Nintendos choice of CPUs, as far as I can see, both items are open to question.
 
"The physics and AI should be no worse then GameCube was capable of."

I imagine you don't think physics and AI to be non-CPU problems, at least not for Gamecube or 3DS. Regarding his later response, GameCube did have fixed function T&L and I'm sure games used it. So it's pretty apples to apples.

Plenty (if not most) GC games used both the GPU and CPU (to varying degrees) to handle T&L. I remember IBM/Nintendo talking about how the CPU's ability to help with the task of T&L was an important factor in its design.

You know, it would have been so easy for you to simply ask me "Do you think that two ARM11 CPU's at 266Mhz are as powerful as Gekko", instead of making assumptions and running with them.
 
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The way you and Darkblu put it, it is an absolute statement. A statement of faith, if you wish.

It is only in our best interests if
A, we reap tangible benefits
B, there are no drawbacks or (hidden) costs involved.

If any one or both of the above two points aren't fulfilled, advancing technology is at best debatable, or worse, a negative.
In the specific case of Nintendos choice of CPUs, as far as I can see, both items are open to question.

The phrase "advancing technology" isn't the least bit self-defining. We're taking it to mean two different things. You take it to mean "improving" some aspect such as raising clock speed, possibly to the detriment of other aspects. I'm talking about making the technology all around "better", which by definition would incorporate both a and b.

Now, we can talk about what the actual effective tradeoffs are (as we have been in this thread), but let's not get lost in semantics.

Plenty (if not most) GC games used both the GPU and CPU (to varying degrees) to handle T&L. I remember IBM/Nintendo talking about how the CPU's ability to help with the task of T&L was an important factor in its design.

That probably goes for most systems with vertex shading too. At the very least, tasks such as model matrix multiplication (which can be considered part of transformation) is usually done on the CPU, as well as high order culling. It remains to be seen how it'll be done in 3DS games.

You know, it would have been so easy for you to simply ask me "Do you think that two ARM11 CPU's at 266Mhz are as powerful as Gekko", instead of making assumptions and running with them.

I'm sorry, did I offend you? Maybe you should have clarified more what you meant when you said it..?
 
That probably goes for most systems with vertex shading too. At the very least, tasks such as model matrix multiplication (which can be considered part of transformation) is usually done on the CPU, as well as high order culling. It remains to be seen how it'll be done in 3DS games.

Gekko had to support Flipper more then the ARM11's will have to support PICA200, surely we can agree on that.

I'm sorry, did I offend you? Maybe you should have clarified more what you meant when you said it..?

Offended?, no I'd just rather not have to correct a glib assumption when it was so easy to ask me to explain my meaning in the first place.
 
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That probably goes for most systems with vertex shading too. At the very least, tasks such as model matrix multiplication (which can be considered part of transformation) is usually done on the CPU, as well as high order culling. It remains to be seen how it'll be done in 3DS games.
I think Teasy was talking of something else here: per vertex work.

Building any kind of per-drawcall matirces is hardly comparable to per-vertex workloads. And indeed, Gekko does have facilities for alleviating CPU->GPU vertex pipelines, so a conclusion that by design Gekko was meant to help with per-vertex workloads is not unfounded.

Clearly, this is me talking without having seen the source codes of a single Cube commercial game.
 
I think Teasy was talking of something else here: per vertex work.

Building any kind of per-drawcall matirces is hardly comparable to per-vertex workloads. And indeed, Gekko does have facilities for alleviating CPU->GPU vertex pipelines, so a conclusion that by design Gekko was meant to help with per-vertex workloads is not unfounded.

Clearly, this is me talking without having seen the source codes of a single Cube commercial game.

Yeah its actually something that IBM made clear in early interviews regarding the chip. Can't find them now but I remember reading some back in 2001/2. I think IBM mentioned Luigi's Mansion in particular as one game that used Gekko quite heavily.
 
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Interesting, that Orange-branded Android phone is completely unlocked?

I could walk in and just buy that for 99 Pounds, probably root it and run some kind of Wifi hotspot software and it will be around the price of a Mifi.

Doesn't list the processor speed or battery capacity.

Would be nice if an HTC or some other known brands get down to that level.


No but it can be unlocked for for like £3.

The phone is already rooted, serious progress is being made on custom roms and the 2.2 kernal is available so its just a matter of time before that update is available.

The SOC is a Qualcomm MSM7227 with a 600mhz ARM11 and the GPU isn't completely awful like a lot of earlier Android phones. The huge 512MB of RAM should make a big differnce for general speed/responsiveness. Battery is 1250mah and I've heard no complaints about poor battery life so far.

Anything else you'll want to know can be found in the review and forum here:

http://android.modaco.com/content/z...318802/paul-reviews-the-orange-san-francisco/

http://android.modaco.com/category/453/zte-blade-blade-modaco-com/

The OEM is ZTE and they're not exactly new to the smartphone market, their products just tend to be rebranded in the west. The T Mobile Pulse was the previous budget Android phone of choice but this thing seems to blow it away, the crappy camera is the only real sore point. It really is incredible what you can get for your money these days. I'll be picking one up soon! :D

P.S. Sorry for the offtopic posts, mods!!
 
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Here's some of those videos I'm talking about:

MGS3: http://www.konami.jp/mgs_se/
I know this is something I'm way more sensitive to than most, but the aliasing in that video almost ruins it for me.

Why is that? Capcom have demonstrated images from the 2D mode of their game (the shots with motion blur which is currently not working in S3D mode) and they were the same 400x240 resolution as all the rest.
That's because 800x240 screenshots would look stretched to double width on any screen with square pixels.

According to all reports so far the screen is true 800x240, 400x240 for each eye in 3D mode. And if 3D is meant to be the usual mode of operation that makes a lot of sense, as it means you get "square" pixels (not really tiny squares – which is never the case anyway – but with equal pixel density in both dimensions).

I doubt that's the explanation for those images. It is somply not justified for games that normally run in stereoscopic mode to switch to true 2D mode just when somebody moved the 3D slider all the way down. That would imply an arbitrary-complex GPU and VRAM re-initialisation across frames, etc.
I'd be surprised if changing the viewport and a couple of pointers in the display pipeline would require "arbitrary-complex GPU and VRAM re-initialisation".

That's not how properly designed human interfaces work. Continuous (i.e. analogue) controllers provide continuous effects. How many sound systems do you know that change from mono, to stereo, to surround, on an analogue input?

The difference is in the disruptive effect. While in practice that slider is most likely just another anaologue input meant for the games to act upon, I'd be really surprised if nintendo's game certification process allowed devs to use it any other way but as a smooth level-of-stereoscopy controller, at least for steresocopic titles.
Nintendo's images show that the slider is pretty clearly labelled "OFF" at the bottom. I'd expect it to actually be a switch in that position, i.e. it won't just slide to the off position, you'll have to push a bit harder and it will lock in place.
 
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