dahuman said:
jarrod said:
dahuman said:
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 10 years ago now but with 1/30 of the power use.
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he was just being a smart ass, the cube can do all those and more, but you have to work on a fixed pipeline if you want a lot of other things which can be very inefficient on performance. Pica unfortunately is in that same state but with a very updated design and supports GL ES1.1(which is 1.5 really) so people can do much more since it supports the common important effects of today's games.
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Wii could maybe, but it's my understanding that GameCube's nerfed memory architecture inhibited a lot of use for the TEV. Of course, developer apathy seems to have made pushing TEV on Wii an equally futile proposition. At least Wii managed normal mapping and rim lighting. :/
Also, the NV2A in the Xbox was technically a fixed pipeline chip. People tend to associate the fixed nature of Flipper as what held it back, but it was really just familiarity with the APIs. That's something that Xbox and now 3DS don't suffer, thankfully.
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actually, you have the thing in reverse, NV2A was one of the first to have programmable pipelines, but the xbox was too much like a PC and had bottlenecks when it came to memory, the Cube parts worked much better in sync than the original Xbox ever could. The problem if you ask me, was the limited storage with the mini DVD in the cube, stupid decision.
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But GC only had 24MB of really usable RAM (plus the 3MB on die)? I thought that was the chief limiting factor in really pushing the system?
And yeah, I know Xbox was terrible when it came to efficiency, but it was my understanding that Pixel Shader 1.1 is fixed function register combiners (similar to TEV) and that's what NVA2 (GeForce3 series based) used? It wasn't truly programmable (just as the PICA200 core in 3DS isn't), just better exploited, supported and documented than what we saw with TEV?
