I Call BULLSHIT. IGN is getting false information from somewhere. It is impossible for the 3DS to be more powerful than the Wii, maintain it as a portable and be affordable.
I know there is a general habit of not listening to people who make common sense, but for once listen to reason and something that actually makes sense.
There reasoning on 3DS power comes from being stupid morons. The standard DS 3d game aims to be 30fps so let's run with that. IGN assumed 1 thing correct. You need twice the rendering power. Essentially the 3ds needs to render at 60fps to maintain 30fps.
The Stupidity. IGN is assuming that minimal double the power is required right across the board. This is incorrect. This assumption comes from the basis that rendering requires recalculating the vectors and texturing for both the left and right frame. This is true. They are then assuming that this will requiring twice the CPU. This is wrong. They are assuming twice the graphical chip. This is wrong. They are assuming Twice the main ram. This is WRONG. WRONG WRONG WRONG.
A 3d world only needs a single CPU calculation to determine current world values. Minus the Camera position.In the software end there will be TWO/2 Cameras in the world for rendering purposes. Rendering is not vector calculations. Once the world is calculated. 2 Parallel Graphical Chips will Render the world; one for each Camera. This will generate the 3D effect. This means that the 3DS does NOT NEED a single better graphical chip. Remember that the cost curve for more power into a single chip becomes exponentially expensive. I believe that we have already seen a Patent with 2/TWO 3d chips in a DS.
That means that a GBA could run 3D as long as it had 2 Parallel graphical processing chips. You heard me I said GBA. The 3D effect is not generated from the CPU it's from 2 graphical chips. This means that the 3DS does not need to be considerlly more powerful. It could be a DSi with a slapped in extra Graphical Unit(chip gfx mem). That's it. No exponential cost and 3d will be achieved.
Finally. The DSi is double the power of the DS. Though notice how there are no DSi games that make use of it? Also there was a prior poly limit to the hardware render even though developers could have pushed it past if allowed.
3DS will be a tweaked DSi with maybe a smidge more power, but importantly it will have an extra Graphical Unit for parallel graphical processing.
Squilliam: On Vgcharts its a commonly accepted practice to twist the bounds of plausibility in order to support your argument or agenda so I think its pretty cool that this gives me the precedent to say whatever I damn well please.
