3DS to be more powerful than Wii -- Not using Nvidia's Tegra

What I meant to say was software controlled. Edit: As opposed to hardware/analog similar to how the volume controls are in the DSLite. Yes, there's a slider, but it still controls by the numbers.

 

The Street Fighter 4 shots almost guarantees this machine is more powerful than the Wii or Xbox 1. It looks like a low screen resolution version of the console game.

However surprisingly the Nintendo games are low on shaders and effects - they look just like Wii games.

How adequate is be the 800x240 screen resolution for gaming and watching movies?

 

I have one question...I believe that 3D takes quite a bit extra power to render? Would it be possible for the developers to have a scaling system, where the visuals get better the more you turn off the 3D effect?

 

The amount you pay for the effect would be all or nothing, not something that would scale with "how 3D" something is.

The first party games definitely don't like Wii level. To me they don't quite look Gamecube level either.

Are there more SF4 shots? Because you can't glean very much from the one posted in this thread, but from what I can see the level of geometric complexity and texture detail is on a different order of magnitude, this isn't just rendered at a lower resolution. But the complexity information is really more in the backgrounds than in the fighters, and if you look at this one you see a few low polygon models for chairs and tables, low resolution textures for table shadows, a person that's a cardboard cutout, and a background behind him that's a flat and blurry skybox. It's just all taken at an angle that obscures this.

The lighting and shadowing on the console versions also looks better. Really I'm not sure what's surprising people about this screenshot - it has edge marking and shadowing, but these are two features DS had in hardware w/o shaders.

Can someone who understands the technology used in the screen remark on if this really becomes an effective 800x240 once the 3D is turned off?

 

It does, at least physically. Whether Nintendo chooses to support it is another question.
The parallax barrier is really just a fine LCD grille raised a tiny bit from the screen. When it's turned off it just becomes invisible.

 

Well, you could render the background (beyond a fixed distance d) only once for both eyes.
Now you can vary this distance d to get a more or less complete "3D Effect". I have a hard time imagining how much the transition from "Background" to "3D" would be noticeable, if its way worse than just a LOD transition or pop-in (could be coupled with LOD on the same boundary distance) .

 

In one of the many interviews I've read (can't remember which one) it was confirmed that games don't have to use the 3D effect. I'd assume these games would be able to take advantage of the extra resolution, although I guess Nintendo could still restrict it if they want to.

 

Apparently leaked specs from a chinese message board. I'd advise a grain of salt.

CPU ARM946E-S (67 MHz) + ARM1176 (TSMC65LP 225-482MHz)
GPU PowerVR SGX543MP2
RAM 16MB + 48MB

http://forum.tgbus.com/viewthread.php?tid=1162347&extra=&page=1

 

Wouldn't that combination be very CPU bound? I wouldn't be surprised by the use of the ARM11 instead of a newer Cortex core, but I always thought such use would be more like a 45nm shrink of the original Tegra operating at 600MHz+.

 

If those specs are true a big factor will be whether or not the ARM11 has L2 cache. This is the real differentiator in performance between say, iPhone 3G and 3GS CPU performance, much more so than the increased issue width between ARM11 and Cortex-A8. The typical difference in performance between 256KB of L2 and no L2 for an ARM11 at ~500MHz can be as much as 2x.

Unfortunately people lambasted Tegra for using ARM11 despite having L2 cache, without really looking to make a fair comparison.

 

There's more chance of England winning the World Cup than the 3DS featuring a PowerVR XT core.

 

So an ARM9 slower than DSi's (what else would that ARM9 be doing there except BC?) and dual core SGX54x? Why, yes, makes total sense!

 

Very, very good sir !

 

I don't know. What's the Starlet doing all day?

 

No clue. Rumor has it something along keeping a lone gate sticking in a field of butterflies.

 

ARM11 and ARM9 are backwards compatible.

 

Wii also has a low power low frequency ARM9 CPU (Starlet), not for backwards compatibility but for security tasks (OS?) and connect 24. 3DS also has connect 24 this time around so this may not be as strange as it sounds. Dual GPU's would make sense for 3D I suppose.

 

I'm not sure backward compatibility on an ISA level is sufficient to safely mimic a heterogeneous system (particularly one with a massive sw catalog), as there's no such 'mode' you could put the ARM11 in, that would be per-clock BC with the ARM9. Of course, it's all subject to trade-offs, of which nintendo have the final word.

 

Suppose this is real, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

 

It would be an order of magnitude faster than what I'm fearing is in the 3DS (being CPU limited doesn't come into the picture, the SGX is >DX10 level, for games targeted at it it really doesn't need that beefy a CPU). So yes, it would be a good thing.