PICA200 in 3DS detailed

[thop]

I made a seperate thread for this to get input from those who might otherwise ignore updates in big threads. It is also more specific than just general hardware of the machine.

DMP held a press conference in which they shared further details. The report is in Japanese so all this information is based on Google Translate so far

http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/3dcg/20100715_380961.html
http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/series/3dcg/20100716_381357.html

First of all it is based on the 200Mhz version but Nintendo apparently even considered this to be excessive.

It seems 4xMSAA is mentioned.

Perhaps the most interesting part is a passage about the SDK which seems to suggest that developers can just make OpenGL 2.0 shaders, and the SDK will "semi-automatically" convert these into MAESTRO shaders.

There is a lot more, but difficult to decipher. Everything I posted might in fact be completely false

 

[Simon F]

Google translate also says procedural textures? Could it just mean something like support for Wang texture tiles? Or are they doing some 2D vector graphics processing first into a local texture?

 

[wsippel]

Google translate also says procedural textures? Could it just mean something like support for Wang texture tiles? Or are they doing some 2D vector graphics processing first into a local texture?

DMP hypes procedural textures as one of Maestro's defining features. If you've seem the Mikage techdemo, the wooden floor is a procedural texture based on noise generation. There's a more in depth explanation, on the Khronos website I think, but I can't find it anymore (it's not on the "Samurai Enlightened" slide from Siggraph 2006).

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's an intriguing idea, especially for a portable, although one worries that it'd produce very samey games in art-style, every game with wood using the same generator. Plus, how is that more efficient in fixed hardware versus programmable shaders? Procedural textures, at least anything worth bothering with (and not Wang tiles as Simon suggests), require some reasonably complex number crunching. Tying that processing power up in fixed hardware seems a poor choice of efficiency when it could be provided in open shaders that could be directed onto other tasks if wanted. Whereas hardware dedicated to Wang tiling makes sense.

 

[wsippel]

The texture generation seems to be very flexible and it should be possible to create a nearly infinite number of different textures suiting many different styles. As far as I can tell from the Google translation, it always looks the same if you use the same parameters, though. And if I'm not mistaken, the size of the generated texture is not important at all, so you could generate huge textures with no ugly tiling, and the texture would still have an "infinite" resolution and won't look pixellated no matter how close you zoom in. All that, in addition to the huge memory and bandwidth savings and the flexibility DMP promises, should make it so commonly used that doing it in fixed function hardware might make sense in the end.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

First of all it is based on the 200Mhz version but Nintendo apparently even considered this to be excessive.

What was the polygon count for the 200Mhz version again?

The texture generation seems to be very flexible and it should be possible to create a nearly infinite number of different textures suiting many different styles. As far as I can tell from the Google translation, it always looks the same if you use the same parameters, though. And if I'm not mistaken, the size of the generated texture is not important at all, so you could generate huge textures with no ugly tiling, and the texture would still have an "infinite" resolution and won't look pixellated no matter how close you zoom in. All that, in addition to the huge memory and bandwidth savings and the flexibility DMP promises, should make it so commonly used that doing it in fixed function hardware might make sense in the end.

Wow, that sounds amazing. I was always under the impression that we need bigger textures to prevent blurring and what not when you get close to it, but this sounds even better.

 

[Aeoniss]

Unless I'm a total idiot, I think given that this is a 200Mhz version we can double the numbers.
So 80million triangles and 800mpixels?


Providing I'm correct, 200Mhz version is just shy of the Xbox 1 GPU in regards to megapixels and in many aspects identical or slightly superior to the Wii "Hollywood" GPU.

 

[MfA]

It seems 4xMSAA is mentioned.

Which is nice, but in and of itself not really useful knowledge ... does it have 4x the z-check throughput of normal fillrate and framebuffer compression.

 

[darkblu]

Which is nice, but in and of itself not really useful knowledge ... does it have 4x the z-check throughput of normal fillrate and framebuffer compression.

I know google translate is hardly the best means, but i recall that's what i read in the translation somewhere, i.e. 4x z rate, per fragment, producing 4x msaa.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

BTW, according to some people on another forum, those links are worthless. They are essentially Japanese versions of the English slides we posted before. It's just talking about the PICA300 in general and not really the details on the 3DS chip.