Just felt like posting some pics. Is that last one cel shading?
DS isn't some bad, the pictures could almost be mistaken for poor quality badly compressed screenshots of current games....on a small screen they may be almost identicle.
BTW, I think ds is quite a bit better looking than ngage...ngage doesn't have filtering either, but at least ds is higher res and can do a heck of a lot more polygons.(how? ds must have a graphics processor of some sort or dual cpus, no way they're achieveing those graphics on an arm9 alone, which both the tapwave and ngage have) Boy, I guess the ngage is truly dead now, can't compete with nintendo on price or technology now.
Zodiac fares a bit better, but I still don't think it compares. If it weren't for the psp(and the ique partly, and dreams of an mbx or gamecube powered portable....) then we'd probably be praising the ds for its graphics. It's always been possible for handhelds to have better graphics than they've had, but that comes at a cost, and is it really worth it on such a small screen where the differences can't be noticed as well? I know if I had a choice between a console and a handheld, even if all the tech specs are equal, I'd take the console just for the bigger screen.
BTW, the games actually running on psp are noticably below ps2 quality, look at that snake model in the picture above, a "what if mgs2 was running on dreamcast?" scenario? At least the polygon models in the partly 2d mario64x4(and the sidescroller) look about on par with the gamecube models in mario party 4(which has high quality models, and 2d backgrounds), though in a fully 3d game like mario kart it is certainly lacking...I don't see why they didn't use 2d characters in that like in mario kart 64, looks more like a saturn game in that picture. Maybe mario kart is still in the really early stages and was intended for something weaker than the ds we're seeing now...
But I'd say all the ds is really lacking is bilinear filtering, which may not be needed on a 3" screen, but could that be added in somehow before the ds is released?(how hard would it be to create a chip that just filters the graphics the cpu does, or to implement a filtering function onto the cpu?)
There, much better metroid pic now.
And I take that back about the ds having gamecube models, it's harder to tell, but the bowser in the ds picture definetely isn't rounded all around like the other one. But that's nintendo's advantage of having simpler looking characters, people don't notice the graphical differences as much unless they move away from the normal look of the character.(ssbm's blue jeans mario)
Not quite the picture I was looking for, but this shows what some filtering could do for the ds's graphics. I think for a better example, start up halflife in software rendering at low res, then compare that to with 3d acceleration at the same res.
An example of what it would be like if they threw in a 3d chip, start up ut2004, run it in software mode, then run it in direct3d mode.
Lol, I tried to find a picture of the gamecube metroid to compare to the ds metroid, but I'm sorry, even the crappiest picture puts that one to shame. But it's not hard to find one(of mgs2 or twin snakes) to put mgs acid to shame either, just it doesn't look quite as shameful when compared.