| Kynes said: Maybe there is a misconception on what the developers said. I think they are refering to the technical capabilities in an OpenGL compatibility way. Wii, as Gamecube or PS2, has a fixed function graphics unit, DX7 compatible, while PS3 and X360 have a DX9 compatible graphics chip. Maybe 3DS has a DX9 or better graphics chip, and is much easier to program than the infamous TEV unit, so they can make, at lower resolution due to less bandwidth, less shading and texture units, the same effects you can do in X360 or PS3. |
Well, basically those were just rumours. Until we have some hard specs or further proofs the opinion of a quite knowledgeable tech guy who tried the 3DS firsthand is quite different:
Let's get out of the way everything that it isn't. There's absolutely no sign at all of an NVIDIA Tegra GPU in this as previously reported, and clearly the graphics technology is not in the same league. Earlier suggestions that the new console would be in the same visual class as PS3 or Xbox 360 are incorrect.
What we do have is a massively significant increase in rendering power over the existing DS, leap-frogging the PSP and probably offering around the same horsepower as a Dreamcast, maybe in some respects giving PS2-level performance. But from everything I've seen so far there's no sign of the sort of rendering features that you see in iPad or iPhone 3GS, so no evidence of programmable pixel shaders or other state-of-the-art OpenGL ES 2.0 loveliness.
(from the Digital Foundry hands-on)
In the language you suggested, that would be about Direct3D 7, as programmable shaders were introduced in D3D 8. A portable device in the Dreamcast-to-PS2 range still sounds greatly impressive to me, and it actually sounds truer given Nintendo's history of privileging battery life over raw power.
