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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."
So, in theory, this should be able to run DOOM 3 in 3D. I donnow, it sounds cool to me.
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.
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?
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.
That is also the case for the Playstation 3, and you can not deny it has pixel shader support.
Uncompetitive? How so? They've sold way more consoles than their competition. What is wrong with mass appeal? It keeps them in business!
Demo video
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2.0 has vertex and pixel shaders. This chip has vertex shaders, but not pixel shaders. And you don't need to create an extension for shaders - they've been around since before 2.0 - you just need to implement it.
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What? the ps3's RSX is based on Nvidia's Geforce 7900 architecture, which features Pixel shader 3.0 as seen in DirectX 9.0C. (and vertext shaders as well) I would say that qualifies as full shader support by even the most rigid definition. The fact that the PS3 might have some custom extension doesnt detract from that.
In this PICA chip however, the extensions apparently are the only form of shader-like functionality, and apparently dont quite conform to what most people in the industry would call full shader support
Also, pixel shaders? my 7 year old Geforce 4 wants its features back... (and yes, i know GF3 had them first, as did the radeon 8500, i just dont have those things myself)
People, what a bunch of bastards
I wanted to say "vertex shader" and not "pixel shader". As you point, the PS3 has both vertex and pixel shaders, while the PICA200 seems to have just vertex shader support.
As expected, Nintendo is using a severely underpowered chip that is at least 5 years obsolete in pure technological terms.
It seems to have more actual vertex shading power than the iPhone 3GS.
In this market, going for streamlined capabilities and lower power consumption probably beats DirectX 10.1 support. (which the SGX535 only has in theory - there's no drivers out to provide such capabilities?)
I'm interested in seeing how much RAM they stick on it. Since they're Nintendo, I'll bet on... 64-128MB.
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
You forgot the part where they make some of the greatest video games in the world. But don't let that fact get in the way of your argument.
The GPU wars died about 3 years ago. There was a point at which people stopped willing to pay an extra $200 - $300 for a marginal increase in realism.
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.
They also started to realize polycount != fun.
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.
Bullshit. Where is Nintendo lying about the capabilities of their hardware? Where are they selling something that doesn't do what it says on the box?
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.
How is the fact that Nintendo isn't putting the emphasis on graphics performance to the exclusion of other factors somehow dishonest? And how is basing the decision to buy a videogame system on something other than graphics performance stupid? And finally, what is the great crime here for which "fault" needs to be assigned? Marketing a product that you don't want to buy? What a grievous sin that is.
Partly because game developers/publishers started focusing their efforts on consoles instead of PCs.
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.
Seems like it's a better strategy nowadays, to sell dreams and lies, than to create actual value.
Riiight. So you equate computing and rendering power with "value". Not fun games. Not an enjoyable user experience. Not accessibility or approachability. Simply computing power. And anyone who isn't selling high-powered, over-priced consoles at a loss is, apparently, "[selling] dreams and lies"...
Gee, I can't imagine why MS and Sony are getting their asses handed to them, given this *obvious* failing on Nintendo's part.
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.
Tech geeks thing hardware requires big numbers to be competitive. However, being competitive also encompasses things like low cost, ease of development, appealing application of the technology (e.g, 3D display in this case), and more.
"Fraudulent?" Huh?
It's like you're operating under some weird, arbitrary assumption that GPU power is all that matters, and selling points that aren't based on that are "dreams and lies." Basically, you're a kook and a graphics whore.
How is it a bad thing to focus on the mass-market instead of focusing on graphics abilities alone? The Wii and DS have been astounding successes, showing that the market doesn't really need superb graphics.
When you call Wii "uncompetitive", how do you combine that with the fact that it sells more than the "competitive" consoles combined?
Clever signature text goes here.
Nintendo's strategy with the Wii was to get the Wii Remote into people's hands and get them playing. Apparently millions of people tried it and found that it created value for them, so they bought it. How is putting the Wii Remote in people's hands and urging them to try it "selling dreams and lies"?
Clever signature text goes here.
So they're basically producing a console that people want, rather than shoving continual 'improvements' in technology down their throats.
Those bastards.
Is 1563649 a prime number?
> Neither the GameCube nor even the Wii had programmable shaders,
The article is misleading.
Having shipped two Wii games the Wii has _half_ a pixel shader. Technically, the Wii has 8 TEV stages where each stage can do a texture lookup, although in practise you probably wont use more then 4 for performance reasons. While the TEVs are limited you CAN still do projected shadows + Shadow Buffers using CMP + pass_pixel_if then ROPS. Check out some of the GX demos of the RVL SDK for more details.