Nintendo 3DS hardware thread

Ok, let's pretend Nintendo will use the most powerful version from 2008, how would that compare to Tegra 2?

 

That not really either. With the screen tech in the 3DS, both frames are displayed simultaneously. So it's more like 2x400x240@30fps. It's a whole new frontier of nomenclature!

 

Of course Wikipedia can't be trusted, but there it says it's in fact using 2 separate 400x240 displays on top of each other

 

Its using a 800x240 screen that displays two images and a parallax barrier in front of that screen to direct the alternate images to each eye.

EDIT: After looking at Wiki I think you've misunderstood what is written there.

 

Lazy8s posted about this GPU way back in 2006

 

They are noobs.

I'm guessing the licensing costs are real low and the fact that they were university researchers explains why they have hardware support for subsurface scattering.

I just don't see how useful that is, seems like a waste of transistors.

 

I didn't mean it was literally running at double the frame rate, I'm just saying that the GPU load would be (close to) the same as if it were. Not the same as increasing the resolution, which wouldn't change the geometry load.

 

Tegra 2 should be something like 70Mverts/sec and 1.9G Z-only pixels/sec, 480 shaded (including texture fetch/Z etc), so say ~750Mpix/sec with 50% Z reject (random order draw). GLES 2.0, floating-point pixels and "free" AA, all at roughly the same power. I'm scratching my head over this one, but I'm sure N knows what they're doing...

 

They will succeed because their competition sucks ... they can afford to cut corners to save a buck on licensing even if they could get more performance per watt from someone else.

Sony's execution is a joke. Microsoft, haha ... and Apple only does casual, which makes them not a competitor at all.

If Sony decided right now they would bring a SGX based design next year using 3M's stereoscopic screen I think they would be able to eat Nintendo's lunch. They could compete with them on price but blow them away in IQ (AA is a big deal IMO). The 3DS would be the Dreamcast to their PS2, except this time the inferiority wouldn't be mostly grounded in perception. They could have development systems ready in a couple of months and 3DS games should be easily ported if they go with ARM as well, so they shouldn't have too much problems getting launch titles even with an accelerated launch. Of course they won't do this, because well ... that's not how big companies work.

 

Where did you come to the 'roughly the same power' conclusion? Power consumption is likely one of Nintendo's larger concerns.

 

Umm... kinda like how the PSP was beaten by the DS?

 

The PSP was a monster ... they could never compete with the DS on price with that.

So, no ... nothing like PSP/DS.

 

They do compete with the DS on price - you can get a PSP for the same price as a DS.

 

The demo shown of Resident Evil: Revelations. I'm not quite sure why they would want to use low-poly models in an FMV (not to mention some effects like motion blur used liberally in cutscenes which is conspicuously missing). Seems pretty achievable given it's running at 30fps.

 

AndriaSang reports via 4Gamer that RE:Revelations is utilizing MT Framework.

 

While that Resident Evil video look really good for a portable game, it also doesn't appear to be rendered at 400x240 without AA to me, the edge IQ being perfect on that video.

Now was it super-sampled and rendered frame-by-frame in-(3DS)engine, or was it the 3DS assets running on the PC version of MT Framework, that I can't tell.

 

Is anyone else salivating to see what Sony's responce to this is in terms of its CPU/GPU for psp2, its gonna be wow....

If RE is real time on the 3ds, im buying it at launch

 

The 3DS that is, not RE...too scary for me, i'm no good with those survival horrors I will watch someone playing them but I won't play them myself.

 

I like the idea of the 3DS for sure, and it appears to give me a little more of the stuff I am interested in than the DS did, but I'm totally going to wait and see until I get to try this by myself. Of course it will also be interesting to see how Sony replies, but right now I'd say that the 3DS is ahead of the curve in terms of software being developed for it, so it may take Sony a while to catch up, even if they decide to go for something 3D tech related (which they may not, we'll see).