| Resident_Hazard said:
Ther vertex performance is lower, which translates to ever-so-slightly lower poly-counts for characters in the game. Now, if the 3DS's texture and mapping abilities exceed the PSP (which, to be fair, early Resident Evil screenshots do indicate such a thing), then that can easily make up for lower poly counts. It's a pretty standard trick that good enough textures and bump mapping can hide lower poly counts. The other thing, where did you hear that the 3DS cards would go up to 8GB? I'd previously read only 2 GB. Frankly, I don't see why they couldn't reach 16 GB as far as I'm concerned as the technology doesn't seem that different from SD card technology, and those can reach 32 GB easily. Even the micro SD cards reach 8 and (I think) 16 GB, which, growing up with the computers and technology that I did grow up with--is just mind-blowing. If this card technology continues the way it has, Nintendo (or MS or Sony) could theoretically forgoe a laser and disk-based console entirely for the next generation. Rather than DVD's, BD's, or HVD's (which only Nintendo seemed to be working on), companies could use modified flash media and put the games on those. I think it'd be great to see full-blown retail games on some kind of credit card sized physical flash media. Console effeciency would go up, as reading direct from flash media would be energy and RAM-effecient, no laser or motors would keep console heat and noise down, and who knows where they could stop where storage growth is concerned? If you're thinking of the old TurboGrafx Hu-Cards, that's exactly what I'm picturing, except based on SD card flash media. If a regular SD card could do 32GB of space, then who's to say that a next-gen "SD Hu-Card" couldn't do 64 or 128 GB? Downloadable add-ons to games could be written directly to the media, and load times could effectively be a thing of the past. The DS and 3DS have shown the potential future with this technology as DS game cards have got to be shockingly cheap to develop--and Sony agrees since the NGP will utilize similar technology. The downside would be losing DVD/Blu-Ray movie playback, and backwards compatibility to previous consoles, but for less heat, complicated machinery, loading times, and more storage space--why aren't they working on it now? Now that's a great fucking idea. /rant |
I'm a little curious where those specs come from, given Nintendo's never revealed comparable peak theoreticals for 3DS hardware? Are they just using "off the shelf" Pica200 specs for the comparison?
Even still, it's pretty clear from the games we've seen that actual polycounts are at the very least comparable in game between PSP and 3DS, which means the actual 3DS polygon maximum must be significantly higher given it needs to draw everything twice for stereoscopic 3D. Sony's architecture efficiency must be absolute shit on PSP given that, so where's the bottleneck?
The info on 3DS cards going to 8GB comes directly from the manufacturer (Macronix). Actually, if 3DS cards scale at the same rate DS cards did, then their ceiling may hit 128GB by the time the platform's done.
