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Nintendo 3DS GPU Revealed
An anonymous reader writes "The GPU for the Nintendo 3DS has just been revealed, and it's not made by Nvidia, ATI, or even Imagination Technologies. Instead, Nintendo has signed up Japanese startup Digital Media Professionals (DMP) in a deal that sees the company's PICA200 chip churning out the 3-D visuals. For the first time in Nintendo's history, the 3DS will feature a GPU with programmable shaders, rather than a fixed-function pipeline, meaning the 3DS is more graphically versatile than the Wii. Among the PICA200's features are 2x anti-aliasing, per-pixel lighting, subdivision primitives, and soft shadows. As well as featuring DMP's own 'Maestro' extensions, the PICA200 also fully supports OpenGL ES 1.1. The architecture supports four programmable vertex units and up to four pixel pipelines."
A CHALLENGER APPEARS!
So, in theory, this should be able to run DOOM 3 in 3D. I donnow, it sounds cool to me.
anyone remember "neomagic-rap"?
TFA doesn't mention why they went with this over a more established and modern GPU like Imagination's PowerVR or Nvidia's Tegra. OpenGL ES 1.1 isn't really anything to brag about, so I assume it either uses a lot less power, or (more likely) is much cheaper to make.
I figured they'd take this opportunity to make a single-purpose gaming device that was more powerful than the phones they're now having to compete with, so this seems like a weird choice.
"...has signed up Japanese startup..."
The Tegra2 is a really powerful chip and fairly low power, and company like nvidia would have probably sold the thing at or below cost just to get the deal on the assumption they could lower costs in the future to turn a profit at the volumes Nintendo would need. Maybe they screwed up and just couldn't give Nintendo the right deal, but I would be surprised.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Here's a pdf of the specs for PICA200.
http://www.dmprof.com/release/leaflet_PICA200_en.pdf
Looking at just the gfx chip features would draw the conclusion that the PowerVR chips found in a good number of portables is more powerful. It seems to provide ammunition to Apple for them to say the iphone is more powerful.
The demo vids shown are inconclusive though. The Metal Gear Solid demo vids is better than anything on the iphone. As is the suspicious Resident Evil demo. However Kid Icarus is on par with the best iphone games graphically and Star Fox and Mario kart in their current form wouldn't exactly max out the iphone.
Depending on the trickery on display in the MGS and RE demos, the power of the 3DS seems to range from PS2 level to slightly above GC level. Although those two demos are likely not well optimised for the console, they also don't have the gameplay/AI overhead you'd get from a full game.
It's probably safe to assume that the main CPU will be similar to that in the DSi and XL, probably at a higher clock (maybe with a few new instructions).
The main advantage of the 3DS will likely be the battery life. Despite Apple's claims about how amazing the battery life for their devices are, they only ever do benchmarks for tasks offloaded from the main CPU or that aren't taxing. The second you start playing an intensive game, you're looking at a 2 hour battery life. This is something that almost every tech site ignores when talking about idevices as gaming machines.
As expected, Nintendo is using a severely underpowered chip that is at least 5 years obsolete in pure technological terms. Note that the article summary is wrong: there is no pixel shader support in the PICA200 device (and neither is in OpenGLES 1.1), although the chip supports several marketspeak 'extensions' that somewhat allows you to hack a few selected shader-like features into the rendering pipeline.
The resulting hardware is similar to the original PSP, but performs worse and requires a lower resolution. Any modern smartphone is *much* more powerful.
This is reminiscent of the Wii strategy, where Nintendo produces uncompetitive hardware at great margins and relies instead in mass appeal, brand power and gizmo features to unexpectedly great results. No real news here.
Seems odd to advertise programmable renders (suited to OpenGL ES 2.0), but only support OpenGL ES 1.1. Looking at the leaflet, it looks like they only allow vertex rendering programs and not fragment rendering programs. This might be preventing DMP from claiming OpenGL ES 2.0 support. Have to wonder if the lack of interoperability in this respect make these chips cheaper?
OpenGL ES 1.x is fixed-function.
You could say "well, uh, but they could create an extension for shaders!" But then, why not use 2.0?
Sure, 2.0 doesn't have logic op. Big whoop.
Demo video
My other signature is a car
Liar liar!
I am not an nVIDIA or ATi fan, I use whatever suits me, however, with that being said. It would've been great to see nVIDIA's chip in the 3DS.
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
The name of this chip is the "PICA200".
One day, the DMP guys invited the Nintendo suits in for a product demo. As soon as the Nintendo suits saw the promo posters scattered around the room with the demo board on the table, they all sprouted enormous anime-style eyes and shouted "PICA200, I choose you!".
That's how it went down. True Facts.
It's alot easier to ask engineering questions when both you and the guy on the other end speak the same language. Makes asking questions a lot more straight forward. Yes I've been there before. (Admittedly the engineer I was working with over the phone spoke english but the receptionist didn't so getting in touch with him could have easily become a problem.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Perhaps it's as simple as a tax break for using local resources. I don't know Japan's tax codes, but I do know other countries were floating ideas like that at the start of the economic disaster.
The GPU does what they want it to do and is cheap, making the cost to consumers cheaper. When did that become reprehensible?
Suppose that Nintendo sells the 3DS at a 100 USD price. At global launch.
That would make it a very easy purchase and it would annihilate the competition.
Essentially, you just need to render two framebuffers for each frame instead of one.
There's something you need to understand about the DS: It can operate without a full-screen frame buffer. Most games use unbuffered mode, which uses a 48-line-tall ring buffer outside of VRAM that gets filled in four passes from top to bottom as the hardware renders polygons. In this mode, all 512 KiB of the texture memory can be used for textures. Games that have higher poly counts or put 3D on both screens use "capture mode", which captures the output of the ring buffer into a frame buffer. The front and back buffers use up half the texture memory. In order to render unbuffered 3D view, the hardware would have to support both left and right eye views in the ring buffer.
it's unconfirmed whether this GPU powers both screens/the entire system, how many there are, etc. people poking around have the idea there's multiple GPUs.
over a more established and modern GPU like Imagination's PowerVR
You funny guy. If anything, PowerVR today is still limited to whatever the Kyro2 can do. They're sorely out of date and overrated. You can't even do BLOOM on those things without the framerate tanking to 5fps due to the "revolutionary tiled rendering approach". Jesus... have you seen "UE3" on that thing?