Soleron said:
jarrod said:
GameCube could do soft/self shadowing, normal mapping, specular highlights and subsurface scattering? News to me. ;)
Agreed. The effects are better and the chip is easier to work with. However the number of textures/polygons look to me to be Gamecube level, in that I can imagine Mario Sunshine being at the limit of what the chip could display assuming the E3 demos show off the chip well.
The GPU core in 3DS is based on DMP's PICA chip, which dates back to 2006 as the first iteration btw. I'm not sure why you're using ATi chips to try and give a timeline versus Tegra?
The Gamecube used an ATI chip that dates in architecture from 2001. Since I'm guessing the Pica200's chip is about GC capability, and that Tegra is about GF6 capability, I'm measuring the differential in desktop-GPU-years.
Of course both chips were designed much later than those dates, but handheld GPU capability tends to be in step with desktop GPU capability, just X years apart from needing Y number of die shrinks to get the power envelope to ~1/30 of its previous size.
Restated: they can make a chip as capable as 9 years ago now but with 1/30 of the power use.
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In terms of geometry, I'd agree, GC-ish (6-12m/pps in actual game scenarios) is probably on the money for what we'll see. It's worth keeping in mind though that for the 3D to work, 3DS functionally has to draw all those triangles, textures and effects twice... it's more equivalent to 2 GameCubes running in parallel in that sense. If all that horsepower were put into a single image, it'd be well beyond any of the last gen consoles.
Another thing to note, Kojima said the models used in the Snake Eater 3D demo were actually closer to MGS4 level geometry than MGS3. I think the platform might be a bit more robust than we have indications for so far... also worth keeping in mind all those 3rd party demos were thrown together in under 2 months, which makes things like Snake Eater 3D or Resident Evil Revelations all the more impressive.
Also, PICA200 has basically no real relation to Flipper, and the shader architecture seems pretty far off from TEV... honestly, that just seems like a pretty reaching comparison to make.
