masschamber said:
one of the reason I rarely post, trying to explain tech specs is frequently like talking to a brick wall. Trying to explain at ign why halo 2600 was really impressive for the hardware despite its appearance was a testamony to the difficulty. Anway Your right though about the pica, but devs seem to be using pretty effectively already. As far as how it compares with say the ipod or iphone's powerVR sgx depends on how robust maestro is, geometry seems similar if not better in some pica 200 models, but hardware effects will really be the deciding factor and comparing the gpu (though the dedicated vram will help the 3ds quite a bit), the iOS stuff probably have an advantage the cpu given they have a faster armv7, but it could be mitagated if the arm core is optimized for gaming, comparison with the zune is more or less similar. plus as mentioned earlier it probably won't be running a fairly bulky OS in the background anyway the design is clearly designed to be power concious, as I think nintendo put priority on making it look great on a small screen instead of sacrificing their always sucessful model to make the games look good on a giant screen also as far as sony being able to easily top it with the psp2, maybe, maybe not, heat dissapation and power consumption will get pretty high pretty quickly if they try to blow out the 3ds in terms of power, plus they might have to abandon back compatibility if they wish to use arm architecture (the psp used MIPS archeticure, similar to but more advanced than the 64) anyway if these are the true final components, (though earlier patents pertaining to the 3ds imply dual gpu's and dual v ram) we still don;t know all of the exact details about the models, as mentioned earlier the pica200 is a line of processor as s the the arm11, anyway the 3ds will deliver great games that look great on the go, and isn't that all we really want out of a handheld |
I think Nintendo is smart in going for the pica personally, already having those features in a fixed pipeline would generally mean ease of developement and making those effect run very efficiently which cuts time and resources in creating those effects through customized programming that might not even be efficient in performance or memory usage right away. Also if the battery time is just as good as even the DSi, I'd be a happy camper. I'm not expecting ES2 graphics down the line of course, but this design is super for the current handheld.