Nintendo 3DS hardware thread
- Thread starter brain_stew
- Start date
Svensk Viking
Regular
I just wonder, if the rumor about dual ARM11 CPUs for the 3DS is true, how bad/good is that?
Would the 3DS have enough horsepower to handle the XBOX version of Half Life 2?
Would the 3DS have enough horsepower to handle the XBOX version of Half Life 2?
No idea, but if you're asking if it has CPU power comparable to the original XBox I'd say not even close. And that's assuming you get full access to both CPUs, have perfectly load balanced code that utilizes both 100% with minimal overhead from threading, and that the CPUs have L2 cache (I expect they probably won't)
Svensk Viking
Regular
Yeah, that's what I meant...Should have clarified it, but I chose Half-Life 2 because I can't think of any other Xbox games with that physics
So can one say that what we should expect from the 3DS is nice visuals, but lacking AI and physics etc?
You've probably heard the new about some guy smuggling off a 3DS off the assembly line. Well, apparently the battery will be 1300mAh. The guys also tried to boot it up, but only the bios appeared stating a Memory Mode of 96 MB. (A GAF member apparently was alble to get into the Chinese chatroom where it seems to be suggested that the 3DS has 128MB RAM with 96 MB available for use, possibly hinting at an OS.)
Last edited by a moderator:
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
We're now pretty sure there won't be any UE3 engined games for 3DS.
I wonder if they'll ever be able to produce Infinity Blade-like graphics in that console.
I wonder if they'll ever be able to produce Infinity Blade-like graphics in that console.
Infinity Blade has very well done textures and models, but that's pretty much it. It looks amazing, as long as you don't look to closely. I'd argue that it hardly holds a candle to any of the MT Framework titles on 3DS otherwise.
Advanced graphics are more about the amount of useful utilization of available processing resources than buzzword effects, and Infinity Blade displays a lot of simultaneous detail.
The iPad version isn't as complex in shading.
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=751674
The iPad's apparent clock speed advantage with an only marginally higher resolution requirement compared to iPhone 4 probably means it just missed the cut-off for including those extra shaders, too.
The iPad version isn't as complex in shading.
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=751674
The iPad's apparent clock speed advantage with an only marginally higher resolution requirement compared to iPhone 4 probably means it just missed the cut-off for including those extra shaders, too.
UE3 games were unlikely as soon as we found out that the GPU didn't have ES2.0 shaders and that would still be the sticking point now, much more so then RAM.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
Well, there's that OpenGL ES 2.0 shader -> Maestro shader converter they talked about at DMP (don't know if it supports every single OpenGL ES 2.0 extension, though), so I guess a port could still be possible.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
BTW, the PS3's RSX is only OpenGL ES 1.1 compatible, and there's lots of UE3 games for it. The biggest factor seems to be RAM amount. UE3 games for iOS and Android require an absolute minimum of 256MB.
There's even this new UE3 Android game that requires 256MB of free memory at game startup.
Sorry, I don't remember where I saw that.. It was in one of those 3-year-old japanese websites where the only thing I could understand was some of the presentation slides.
On a related note, I just saw something in DMP's site:
PICA Extreme for 2011, which is the 3DS' launch year. Notice how it's in a separate development branch from the OpenGL ES 2.0 SMAPH-S and SMAPH-Next.
Maybe the 3DS carries a last-minute-tweaked souped-up version of PICA-200, the PICA Extreme?
Last edited by a moderator:
BTW, the PS3's RSX is only OpenGL ES 1.1 compatible, and there's lots of UE3 games for it. The biggest factor seems to be RAM amount. UE3 games for iOS and Android require an absolute minimum of 256MB.
There's even this new UE3 Android game that requires 256MB of free memory at game startup.
Sorry, I don't remember where I saw that.. It was in one of those 3-year-old japanese websites where the only thing I could understand was some of the presentation slides.
On a related note, I just saw something in DMP's site:
PICA Extreme for 2011, which is the 3DS' launch year. Notice how it's in a separate development branch from the OpenGL ES 2.0 SMAPH-S and SMAPH-Next.
Maybe the 3DS carries a last-minute-tweaked souped-up version of PICA-200, the PICA Extreme?
I believe that the PICA Extreme is the recently presented SMAPH-H.
Improbable given Nintendo's prefered engineering model. Also, when in 2011 is PICA extreme released?
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
SMAPH-H would be "SMAPH-Next".
As I pointed out in the presentation slide, the PICA and the SMAPH are two different development branches.
PICA-Extreme could be the PICA-200 tweaked for the 3DS, for example a PICA200 + something tey're calling "3DSQUARE" (see bottom of the page).
Some people are hinting at the probability of PICA Extreme being the GPU for the Wii's successor.
From what I understand Pica200 doesn't have fragment shading that's anywhere near as programmable as OpenGL ES 2.0 requires. That's kind of the driving point of the architecture - having a few advanced fixed function shading capabilities that are more efficient than they would have been if implemented with typical programmable hardware.
So I really doubt that you'll actually be able to convert arbitrary shaders to Maestro fixed function capabilities. Maybe there's something that tries for a best possible approximation but that seems really hard to do with a general purpose program. Maybe it'd only work on a very restricted subset of GLSL, but that'd probably quickly defeat the point. My guess is that really the conversion is only meant for vertex shaders (Pica200 does have the standard programmable vertex shading), not fragment shaders.
PS3's PSGL isn't really a good comparison. It may be only strictly compatible with OpenGL ES 1.0, but it has feature parity with ES 2. It just uses nVidia's Cg instead of GLSL for vertex and fragment shading. See this thread for more:
http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?t=673
Hand converting from GLSL to Cg is probably not that hard, and I imagine there are utilities somewhere that can more realistically help than a hypothetical GLSL to Maestro converter. I'm sure Epic's decision of targets for UE3 has more to do with what the platform is directly capable of than what APIs are directly available.
So I really doubt that you'll actually be able to convert arbitrary shaders to Maestro fixed function capabilities. Maybe there's something that tries for a best possible approximation but that seems really hard to do with a general purpose program. Maybe it'd only work on a very restricted subset of GLSL, but that'd probably quickly defeat the point. My guess is that really the conversion is only meant for vertex shaders (Pica200 does have the standard programmable vertex shading), not fragment shaders.
PS3's PSGL isn't really a good comparison. It may be only strictly compatible with OpenGL ES 1.0, but it has feature parity with ES 2. It just uses nVidia's Cg instead of GLSL for vertex and fragment shading. See this thread for more:
http://www.khronos.org/message_boards/viewtopic.php?t=673
Hand converting from GLSL to Cg is probably not that hard, and I imagine there are utilities somewhere that can more realistically help than a hypothetical GLSL to Maestro converter. I'm sure Epic's decision of targets for UE3 has more to do with what the platform is directly capable of than what APIs are directly available.
About the SMAPH-H:
http://www.khronos.org/developers/library/2010_Seoul_DevU/DMP-System-Optimization-DevU_Dec10.pdf
OpenGL ES 1.1 part, something says that is an evolution of the PICA200 and I won't be surprised if this is the PICA Extreme since in their roadmap the evolution of the SMAPH-S is supposed to the an OpenCL part.
About PICA Extreme for the Wii Successor, I won't discard it and it is a very good possibility since it would unify the development libraries of 3DS and Wii 2. From 800x240 to 1280x720 we have 5 times the difference in the amount of pixels. We know from DMP presentation that the PICA200 at 65nm can get 400Mhz and I won´t be surprised if the clockspeed doubles with a 28-22nm process.
DeadlyNinja
Veteran
On the subject of UE3 on the 3DS, how is Capcom able to make their engine work? Does it look like Capcom had to sacrifice a lot for make MT Framework Mobile? Is it just more flexible (possibly less powerful thus work better with lower specs) than UE3?
