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."

Comments

Same old Nintendo strategy

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Same old Nintendo strategy

[Hurricane78]

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.

Well, Apple is quite successful with that strategy.
And the Wii as successfull too.
Also, while MS always has pretty crappy OSes, they too still win with it.

Seems like it’s a better strategy nowadays, to sell dreams and lies, than to create actual value.
Just look at all the nearly empty boxes at supermarket, that are way too large for their content, or look larger in volume than they are. Same strategy.

It always takes two. The fault lies just as much on the idots who buy it, as it lies on the fraudulent (in my eyes) companies.