Nintendo 3DS hardware thread
- Thread starter brain_stew
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I doubt they needed a significant amount of space for the 3D function. The PICA200 itself may not have needed a single modification. Companies are acting like 3D is a complex rendering technique but it's actually just outputting two framebuffers instead of one (or at least as a minimum implementation, and not something that tries to output two sets of vertexes for each primitive at the shader level), and so long as the 3D display operates on two distinct framebuffers and doesn't require interleaving or anything like that any GPU IP out there can already support it.
DeadlyNinja
Veteran
Yeah, very little has changed since I first saw Decent II running on a 3DFX card with active shudder glasses in an Egghead Software in the 90s. Even the parallax barrier screen on the 3DS is a dead simple thing they just stick on top of a normal LCD. It's not magic.
http://nintendo3dsblog.com/double-your-3ds-battery-life-with-the-power-pak
pretty nice for $30 with the dock
pretty nice for $30 with the dock
Is the 3hr battery life for real ? I've never owed a portable gaming device, so I don't have any experience to go on, but objectively it sounds very low, how does it compare to the existing gen devices ?
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/09/nyko-solves-your-3ds-battery-concerns-with-power-pak/
http://www.engadget.com/2011/03/09/nyko-solves-your-3ds-battery-concerns-with-power-pak/
tongue_of_colicab
Veteran
3 to 5 hours is what Nintendo says. Though it will depend on your settings and Nintendo usually seems to be a bit conservative when giving estimates but for sore it's not as long as the old DS. My DSlite does ~7 I think so it's a step down from this gen. Than again, the 3ds is a lot more advanced and if you look at comparable devices basically non of them will have a longer battery life when used for gaming.
3 hours is an absolute minimum, I doubt I'll ever want to play on absolute full brightness anyway and wireless won't be on often for me either. So I expect more like 5-6 hours, still might look at that extended battery though. As its always good to have more battery life and it actually looks quite good aesthetically from those pics.
You have to remember the 3DS battery is really small , like two aa batterys next to each other and flatened a bit .
This battery is going to be the same size as the base of the 3ds so they can easily double battery capacity.
Anyway i got to play a few games at pax east. The 3d worked very wel lfor resident evil mercinarys and street fighter . It didn't work so well for kid ic and that sub game. Zelda looked amazing also.
So i think i might do street fighter and then wait till zelda comes out
It's probably just column doubled.
D
Deleted member 13524
Guest
At some point, there were some developers mentioning FSAA kicking in when the 3D mode is off -> not an automatic feature, but a developer-implemented one.
I think it was Capcom when discussing Super Street Fighter IV.
Any FSAA would probably still be targeting 400x240. Hardknock was talking about hardware scaling from 400 to 800 width. It's really unlikely that they'd use a filter for that kind of scaling.
The more I think about it, though, the more it seems strange that it'd really be 400x240. Assuming that developers have any direct control over what is rendered to which eye, and that the 3D slider determines just how much of each field is shown to one of the eyes, with all the way off showing both to both eyes... then you should be able to get 800x240.
But it could be difficult setting up a scene to render 800x240 as two interleaved fields and look correct. I guess it wouldn't be that much different from the setup for 3D, only with a more orthographic projection that keeps the two fields at a fixed half-pixel offset..
The parallax barrier is a physical thing covering the screen. I'm fairly certain the 3D slider adjustment is done purely in software, probably relate to something like the distance between each virtual eye and/or the FOV. Point is, even if you are displaying an 800x240 frame in 2D mode, the parallax barrier is still obfuscating half of those pixels for each eye, right? That being the case, doubling up your framerate or applying MSAA is going to give you tangible benefits where an 800x240 resolution wont.
According to this teardown, that's not the case. The parallax barrier is a liquid crystal barrier that can be turned off.
I don't see hard technical obstacles to that. The screen shows 800x240 and the means to address 800x240-worth of fb are there.
We'd need to know the underlying screen protocols. How do the devs address the 3D with its adjustable stereoscopy? Do they have full control of the screen, or do they have to send two discrete FBs? There's a possiblity that the horiztonal fields are always interleaved, and the best they can do is set the left and right cameras to the same position and get doubled horizontal pixels.
It looks to me, at least in Puzzle Bubble 3D, this is what they did (left and right front buffer contains the same image in 3D less mode). The built-in games (the AR game, face shooting game, etc.) seem to be the same. A curious fact is that the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees, that is, when you holding it the normal way (i.e. the screen is horizontal) the RGB arrangement is actually from down to up, like this:
Code:
B B B B B ...
G G G G G ...
R R R R R ...
B B B B B ...
G G G G G ...
R R R R R ...The pixel is very "thin," almost to a 2:1 ratio. In 3D less mode, it looks to me that two pixels are combined to form a single, more square pixel.
Of course, this doesn't tell whether it's a hardware limitation or a choice by the software.
In that case, for the time being, the likelihood is that 2D mode is equivalent to just seeing one eye at its lower resolution, 400x240. The thin pixels makes sense as with square pixels you'd have a 2:1 aspect ratio. As the screen resolution is much wider than high, you'd need to pack in more pixels in the horizontal direction. I suppose the other option would be going with a higher resolution screen, 800x600, and duplicating vertical pixels. I wonder how the screen production is maanged to make Nintendo's choice more cost effective?
