Nintendo 3DS hardware thread

[Shifty Geezer]

I can't help wondering at what point handheld devices will connect to larger screens and start replacing stationary/portable computing and graphics devices outright.

See my NextBox suggestions!

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Didn't want to make a new thread, but Apple today said that iPod Touch outsells PSP and Nintendo DS combined.

That is a pretty useless comparison if you ask me. Dedicated gaming hardware vs mp3 player with lots of extra options.

 

[rpg.314]

That is a pretty useless comparison if you ask me. .

Is it equally useless for the developers, who make or break a platform?

 

[MfA]

Actually it's the consumers who make or break the platform ... and the fact they buy the hardware for A/V says nothing about their willingness to buy games, especially not their willingness to buy expensive games with lousy controls.

Nintendo is not just in the business of making cheap casual games, we can deride them for being too kiddy ... but most of their games are still not casual.

 

[Simon F]

MOD NOTE: Have moved Epic Citadel comments to that thread:

 

[sfried]

Did anybody see the new DOA: Dimensions direct screens?

More on Famitsu's website.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Is it wrong that the first thing I noticed are the normal mapped pants?

Now that I think about it, is it possible to animate normal maps? I don't think I've ever seen it. With something like a person's pants, every move will cause the wrinkles and folds to change in real life. Is it possible for the normal map pants to folds to change depending on how you move, or are they stuck like that?

 

[Shifty Geezer]

You can animate normal maps. It's been used in water before, although it's hardly ideal. The problem is coming up with an algorithm for rendering material contortions as a 2D normal map, which is no easy feat. The closest I've seen are blends between normal maps, which features in FIFA for example.

I'm assuming the AA here is PR (flippin' good if not!!), and we don't know what AA the final game will have.

 

[Arwin]

I'm not going to discount good AA built into the hardware somehow as it's pretty important for 3D, but it must also be tempting to have something that can use that rendering power to create an image for each eye and make a nice looking 2D image instead.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I'm not going to discount good AA built into the hardware somehow as it's pretty important for 3D, but it must also be tempting to have something that can use that rendering power to create an image for each eye and make a nice looking 2D image instead.

What about focusing on the bottom screen? The bottom screen is also slightly lower resolution than the 3D screen, so it'll offer a tiny bit of extra power for the 3DS. There are many DS games that do make very good use of the bottom touch screen, and I'd hate to see it neglected just because the top screen is 3D. The touch screen can still offer unique gameplay and fancy pants graphics. Though I'm not sure how much extra power is available just because the graphics render 80 pixels less than the upper screen. I'm not counting 3D.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'm not going to discount good AA built into the hardware somehow as it's pretty important for 3D...

We've speculated about hardware AA, but up til now AFAIA screenshots have had zero AA. That's quite the leap from none to oodles, which is less readily explained with technical measures than PR shots.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

Tecmo has a habit of bullshotting their games like crazy. Check out their old Ninja Gaiden bullshots for the original Xbox.

 

[wsippel]

Just found this presentation of Maestro from 2006. It's all in Japanese and the Google translator hurts my brain, but it seems to confirm Catmull-Clark polygon subdivision in hardware, and contains some benchmarks comparing Ultray (the PICA200 prototype) to a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I stole this post from miladesn on Neogaf. There's some talk from Capcom on the MT Framework engine running on the 3DS. Go to the links to see more images. This forum has a 6 image limit.

game.watch

it's loooong.

MT Framework Mobile on 3DS

- Resident Evil Revelations

Takuechi says that at first he couldn't believe the results they were getting.
The game utilizes all the common rendering techniques on 360/PS3 like HDR rendering, surface shaders and normal maps, there are a lot more details in there and picture comparisons. Death of filed, gamma correction etc all are used.

I don't know if these pics are new or not!!

Left without HDR, right with HDR

Left without color correction, right with it.
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap26.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap27.jpg

Motion Blur, apparently it's not compatible with 3D and is only used in 2D mode.

Left without motion blur, right with it.
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap34.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap35.jpg

Depth of Field
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap32.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap33.jpg

Normal maps

Surface shaders, self shadowing
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap28.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap29.jpg

Anti-Aliasing, it seems that there is up to 2xAA in 2D mode and it's off in 3D mode.

they say that although polygon count and resolution is lower than RE5 but Revelations has similar expression, or something around this.

Street Fighter IV 3DS, apparently it uses MTFM too.
ttp://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap38.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap37.jpg
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/img/gmw/docs/393/420/cap36.jpg

Here is a more detailed English summary of the article.

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/09/13/3ds_mt_framework_detailed/

 

[brain_stew]

So the suspicions we had about 2D mode enabling 2XSSAA through jittered sampling are correct then? Awesome, nice to have that option to choose between the two and to finally get some nice image quality on a handheld.

Its seriously impressive that they've been able to retain all the major effects from the console version of the engine including motion blur which I didn't notice before. It even looks to be per object based as well which is bloody fantastic.


There's a better translation here:

http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2010/09/13/3ds_mt_framework_detailed/

Check out the motion blur comparison. Only the character seems blurred so it doesn't appear to just be cheap camera based motion blur:

 

[Exophase]

I wonder if you get motion blur by literally just blending the left and right eye frames together. They did say that it might be a 2D-only feature, and in that case it might also come at the expense of being enabled w/o AA.

 

[brain_stew]

I wonder if you get motion blur by literally just blending the left and right eye frames together. They did say that it might be a 2D-only feature, and in that case it might also come at the expense of being enabled w/o AA.

They say they've implemented in S3D mode already though, its just the fact that they may not be able to get it to look "correct" is why it may be limited to 2D mode.

 

[Exophase]

That's not necessarily what that meant..

Of course, it's not impossible to do some kind of weighted blending in 3D mode, I think. Naturally you wouldn't want to have the exact same thing on both half.

 

[brain_stew]

Well this is Adria Sang's translation:

Motion blur is currently in a test state. The staff is determining if motion blur fits in with 3D visual output, so it's possible that this will end up being switched off in the final.

That sounds like they've got the technology running in S3D mode in some form already but obviously these things can easily be lost in translation and its not exactly clear anyway. If its possible I'm sure some developer will enable it in S3D mode even if it ends up looking "strange" so we'll find out in due course. Either way, I'm seriously impressed with the amount of technology this title is packing.

 

[Urian]

Do you believe that Cortex R4 could be a good CPU for 3DS instead of ARM11?