NV got DS2 contract according to BSN
- Thread starter TEXAN*
- Start date
I hope so! It'd be another win for the heroic and virtuous ATI if true. (JK)
Its hard to say at this point, if Win Mo 7 phones are ATI and 3DS consoles are using that same ATI chip then im not sure what the implications are for cross platform software development but it does seem like a funny coincidence. Are Nintendo / Microsoft going to colaborate to mutual benefit on hardware? Its something I have wondered about sometimes.
ATI is out of the embedded 3D market for >1 year now. That division was sold off to qualcomm.
Besides that Imageon has nothing in common with former ArtX hw.
***edit: for the rumor mongerers: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile...aphics_Processors_to_Power_Game_Consoles.html
I thought they kept that chip?
IF by game consoles he means ps4/xbox720 etc. then I have to ask, what exactly is he smoking?
They should hire that Zachary Morris bloke (you know the one that keeps insisting that IMG and Sony are working on the latter's next generation console) for PR. With 50 Mali cores in a SoC it should work
the only other thing they need is geometry to scale between cores.
A high end console design means a LOT of resources and a very high risk.. If they go for it power to them; but it won't be easy competing against AMD/NVIDIA which already are developing high end designs.
Yeah, but having sold off all their embedded IP, it's going to be a *long* time before amd can compete in that space again because of power consumption. However, if x86 in handhelds takes off, then they have a lot of royalty potential because they are the only other x86 vendor (VIA is a tossup really).
What I'm curious about is what the backwards compatibility situation will be like if Nintendo indeed uses Tegra 2, or really anything "Gamecube level" like the rumors have specified.
Nintendo has already announced that 3DS will be backwards compatible with DS. Until now Nintendo has only implemented previous-generation backwards compatibility with compatible hardware, and with the current generation (DS and Wii) Nintendo has done this by augmenting the previous-generation hardware (GBA and Gamecube, respectively).
If Nintendo chooses to augment existing hardware again then it won't be using Tegra 2, or any third party IP for that matter. I also think that the basic DS design has some limitations that will make it difficult to scale significantly. ie, I don't think that it will be bumped from 2048 polygons per frame to over 100,000, which it would have to be to really be Gamecube level. This is also not taking into account the need to render things twice for stereoscopic viewing.
Another alternative is redundant hardware. Nintendo could be including the original DS 2D and 3D hardware, but I doubt this because it'd be all but useless in conjunction with a much higher end GPU. So I think it'd be a waste of die space.
Finally, there's software emulation. It's not that much less likely, but I think Nintendo would be introducing compromises, especially if they tried to emulate it with the 3D hardware of the 3DS. I'd be pretty impressed if they actually pulled off an emulator so soon after Tegra 2 would have been sampled, but it's certainly not impossible. If Nintendo has done this then it'd be a good indication of what other handhelds can do.
The "Gamecube level" rumors came a day before the official announcements, which included several details but not this one. I think its omission is somewhat telling. I wouldn't be especially surprised if 3DS hardware was based on the same core DS design and not really even Gamecube level.
Nintendo has already announced that 3DS will be backwards compatible with DS. Until now Nintendo has only implemented previous-generation backwards compatibility with compatible hardware, and with the current generation (DS and Wii) Nintendo has done this by augmenting the previous-generation hardware (GBA and Gamecube, respectively).
If Nintendo chooses to augment existing hardware again then it won't be using Tegra 2, or any third party IP for that matter. I also think that the basic DS design has some limitations that will make it difficult to scale significantly. ie, I don't think that it will be bumped from 2048 polygons per frame to over 100,000, which it would have to be to really be Gamecube level. This is also not taking into account the need to render things twice for stereoscopic viewing.
Another alternative is redundant hardware. Nintendo could be including the original DS 2D and 3D hardware, but I doubt this because it'd be all but useless in conjunction with a much higher end GPU. So I think it'd be a waste of die space.
Finally, there's software emulation. It's not that much less likely, but I think Nintendo would be introducing compromises, especially if they tried to emulate it with the 3D hardware of the 3DS. I'd be pretty impressed if they actually pulled off an emulator so soon after Tegra 2 would have been sampled, but it's certainly not impossible. If Nintendo has done this then it'd be a good indication of what other handhelds can do.
The "Gamecube level" rumors came a day before the official announcements, which included several details but not this one. I think its omission is somewhat telling. I wouldn't be especially surprised if 3DS hardware was based on the same core DS design and not really even Gamecube level.
So were all of those claims saying that an ARM11 chip could handle basic DS emulation leaving the actual GPU to do something else false? If a regular DS game runs in an ARM9 (with DSi games running on an overclocked version), it really wouldn't be that hard to just slap on a higher-end ARM chip that could downclock for regular DS games. The original hardware isn't that complex and there are a ton of DS emulators already running it at full speed.
nathan1988
Newcomer
imo even if nintendo has decided to opt for tegra they will use a crippled version of it. nintendo attaches much more importance to the power consumption rather than to the performance . in fact they dont give a damn how the games look on their consoles anymore .
If that were the case, why would they even bother negotiating with nVidia or any other chip manufacturer for that matter if they could build it themselves? They have their own internal hardware group, if I'm not mistaken.
Who claimed that ARM11 could handle DS emulation? I don't know what you mean by "leaving the actual GPU to do something else", but there's way more that has to be done in emulating DS than CPU. A conventional GPU won't have a very easy time emulating either the 2D or 3D of DS without missing features. At the end of the day it could probably be done, but with quite a lot of shader resources that an embedded GPU may not have. Being able to quickly read back the framebuffer into user memory is also a must. Having direct access to the GPU hardware would help, but we don't know if that's something you get, even if you're Nintendo.
DS emulators out for x86 require at least around 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo and even then tend to run with some degree of frameskip a lot of the time. I don't think Nintendo wants frameskip in their backwards compatibility. And a 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo is grossly more powerful than even the Cortex-A9s in a Tegra 2. Granted, none of these emulators are state of the art in terms of efficiency, but are you experienced enough to say exactly what it takes to emulate DS?
DS hardware actually is pretty complex, just not that powerful. And if you try to virtualize ARM code you'll run into different problems.. just "slapping on a more powerful ARM" isn't a good solution - in DS, for instance, the ARM7 runs in a full GBA compatibility mode that makes the rest of the hardware behave exactly like a GBA. The DS memory map in particular is pretty GBA compatible. This is just not something they're going to get with Tegra 2, which I doubt they'd have any leverage to customize.
I'd have thought that considering the volumes expected, nv wil trip over itself to do a custom nintegra to win the design.
We seriously have no idea what's going down with this. But "custom Tegra" ain't "Tegra", you know?
I think we should wait and see though!
Similar threads
- Locked