That page talks generally about Pica as a core family, and its specifications at 400MHz.

But DMP's official leaflet (2010) about the Pica200 specs it at 15.3M tri/s and 800M pixel/s at 200MHz. And again according to the DMP site, the Pica200 is officially the chip used in the 3DS, it doesn't say "a custom chip based on the Pica core tech".

While N could -in theory- overclock it, I suspect that in nomen omen and that the 200 means that for yield reasons those are cores supposed to work up to 200MHz.

Of course the 3DS has two of them, but it also has two screens to fill. In the end it seems to be slightly stingy on triangles, with good fill rate and the great vantage for the devs of the fixed shader extensions, as you underlined.

It's all coherent with the first-hand assessments of something more powerful than a PSP (the triangle specs for PSP are debatable), inbetween a Dreamcast and a GC in raw power, but with fixed effects that will look good with little work instead of more flexible and complex programmable shaders.

This post and Werekitten///////  should really be listened too.

The image recently displayed is the Pica not the Pica200. The Pica200 is not the Pica. The 200 at the end is clearly the representation of the mhz.

I've been saying all of this before E3 already. When developers claim capable. That does not mean raw power. It's means ability in regards to effects. I don't understand why when Nintendo is a conservative hardware company why people are jumping onto the more expensive tech. This is not Sony who know how to squeeze expensive tech cheap. This is Nintendo who knows how to squeeze power out of cheap technology.

The DS uses a CPU Graphics Core. Which form what I understand is a lookup table not a processing unit. That's why the DS is really good for 3D graphics.

And why is GAF more listened too than say me or other people on this forum. I've gone to GAF and they really don't seem any smarter than the folks here.

Look at it this way. Don't expect power. Expect capability.

Well, I'm pretty sure Nintendo will be customizing the chip to order.  They did the same with IBM for Gekko/Broadway, and again with the ARM series in GBA/DS... Nintendo really hasn't used anything "as is" off the shelf since like 1990.

I agree though 40m triangles would probably be overkill, and geometry looks below GC/PS2 generally (but above DC, mostly on par with or slightly above PSP imo).  Graphics functions seem on par with (but with better APIs than) Xbox 1.

Er... they're the same thing.  Go to DMP's site, PICA200 is the only thing there under "PICA", the only other chips are lower power variants of the 200.

well if you look at the official press release http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&tl=en&u=http://www.dmprof.com/release/20100621_3DS.html you will see it is clearly the Pica200 core that is licensed, and if you look at the leaflet it clearly mentions the Pica 200's scalability as one of it's advantages   http://www.dmprof.com/release/leaflet_PICA200_en.pdf.

 http://www.dmprof.com/en/en_product_graphicsipcore.html 

If you look at DMP's product list you will see they offer 3 different Pica200's one (the Pica200 FPGA model) is clocked 50Mhz and the Pica200 Light can be clocked from 50-166Mhz. So as you can see the 200 does not actually mean that it's clocked at 200Mhz, I think it's a model number much like the GF400 series.

If i understand correctly the PSP is somewhere between a Playstation and a PS2 as far as power goes.  So, it looks like the 3DS is more powerful than the PSP.... excluding the 3D.  Considering the size of the 3DS screen, it likely will get near GC level as far as graphics go.

In terms of appearance it should be kind of like the Gamecube if every developer had known how to use TEV shaders. So we could see a lot of games that look as good as Rogue Leader! Which is frightening.

I'm going to say that people can make better looking games than that on the 3DS since there is still only a tiny fraction of devs that know how to use the TEV but a lot that can do OpenGL in their sleep.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2010-metal-gear/700963 just watched this clip properly and I noticed that Kojima from about 0:15 to 0:30 talks about the specs and and how not just the visuals (he was talking about 3D)"you're now able to do things that were impossible on a handheld" and considering he has just come off developing a game for the PSP that is probably one of the most impressive games on the platform, this suggests to me that the 3DS is a very powerful device and capable of thing's not possible on the PSP (he could be talking about effects or the CPU/RAM not the GPU but still interesting) of coarse he may have just been talking crap or being miss translated but I think I will believe him for now lol he is Kojima after all.