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

[brain_stew]

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

A very good thing, "half" of that GPU was at the upper end of my estimates. I don't think anyone was predicting that Nintendo would be going with such a beefy graphics solution.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Sounds like hell for the battery. I vote fake then.

 

[brain_stew]

Sounds like hell for the battery. I vote fake then.

The battery featured in that spec. list is nearly twice the capacity of the one that shipped with the original NDS and the CPU is still pretty conservative. They should be able to meet their goal of matching DSi battery life with that sort of setup imo.

 

[Svensk Viking]

Exactly how much of a hit does the 3D take on the visuals?
What can we expect from a 3DS game not using 3D?

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Considering the Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil stuff looks great and still in 3D, who knows. Maybe the darn thing really is more powerful than the Wii.

 

[Teasy]

So if that rumoured spec is right how does the SGX543MP2 compare to the SGX535 in the IPhone 3Gs?

 

[brain_stew]

So if that rumoured spec is right how does the SGX543MP2 compare to the SGX535 in the IPhone 3Gs?

Even the single core version is faster than the SGX535 but this is the dual core chip so it'll be more than twice as fast (at the same clock speed). Add to that the fact that developers can target one specific hardware setup and they'll have much lower level hardware access to it, there's no heavy OS to deal with and a lower resolution screen to target and a really large gap in real world performance begins to develop.

There's obviously the issue of the S3D overhead to deal with (which may restrict the vertex count in some games) but it should make for a little pixel shading monster. I'd be stunned if those specifications proved real.

 

[Exophase]

So if that rumoured spec is right how does the SGX543MP2 compare to the SGX535 in the IPhone 3Gs?

I think this is the progression:

SGX530 - 1x TMU, 2x USSE,
SGX535 - 2x TMU, 2x USSE, doubles triangle setup rate over 530
SGX540 - 2x TMU, 4x USSE
SGX543 - 2x TMU, 4x USSE2, doubles depth/stencil (hidden surface removal rate) over 540, does some other stuff to improve bandwidth and increases triangle setup rate another 50%

The earlier cores were part of Series5, and 543 is part of Series5XT, so I think they consider it a bigger core change despite only increasing the product number by 3 (maybe because the number of TMUs/ALUs stays the same)

Now take two SGX543, assuming it scales linearly (should be close-ish, IMG says they scale very well) and you have something that's at least 4x better than SGX535, much more so in shader heavy applications. But this isn't taking into consideration clock speed differences.

 

[MfA]

There was a big gain in IMG stock. There was the SGX544 announcement, but AFAICS it's just SGX543 with an improved VXD for stereoscopic HD decoding ... a 25% increase in share price based on that seems a bit steep.

 

[obonicus]

From http://prw.kyodonews.jp/open/release.do?r=201006189844 via Neogaf

3DS Uses DMP's PICA200 GPU

 

[sfried]

Edit: Beaten to it.