PSP vs 3DS specs rd1

[VMEfinn]

The definitive response.

- The 3DS has a option for bigger game storage than the PSP (Vita is Equal), but the UMD on the PSP is much less expensive, and makes it easier for programmers to make larger games without worrying about cost.

- The 3DS GPU in certain ways (not all) is much more powerful than the PSP, but no where as powerful as the Quad Core GPU in the Vita. That being said, it is not as powerful as the GPU Game Cube, nor is the GPU in the Vita as powerful as the GPU's in the PS3 or 360 as some are saying. On a small screen the GPU's like in the Vita look great, but put on a full size screen they are very poor. To put it into perspective the Vita pushes twice as many pixels as the 3DS, but about half the amount of the 360 or PS3 and thats at a measly 720p resolution.

- The CPU's is another not so simple area to compare as many processors these days are made to digital signal processing. Either way the 3DS is a lot more powerful than the PSP. However the Arm 11 based dual core in the 3DS is no where near as fast as the Arm 7 based (Strangely 7 is the upper end CPU at ARM) quad core cpu in the Vita. In perspective the 3DS CPU pushes about the same amount of mips as the Game Cube, and the Vita pushes about 2/3rds that of the 360 tripple core cpu. In reality though the AMD CPU's are a lightweight general purpose CPU, where as the Power PC based CPU's in the GC, 360 and PS3 are all designed for the systems and have much more brute force. On top of that the PP chips have multi pipeline hardware threading, bigger and faster data and address busses, big data cashes and more. Even then not all MIPS are equal, so for brute force processing the PP's are much more powerful. If you take into account the digital signal processing side of things then the 360 and PS3 would whoop the Vita's CPU's ass.

An easy way to sum the differences between the 3DS and Vita is to look for NVidia Tegra games on Youtube. The 3Ds is about equal to a Tegra 1, yet the Vita is essentially the same as a Tegra 3.

If I was to make a scale of consoles total processing power from PS1 (1%) to PS3 (100%) it would go like this.

PS1 > 1%
PSP > 8%
3DS > 18%
PS2 > 20%
Xbox > 24%
GC > 28%
Wii > 34%
Vita > 40%
360 > 95%
PS3 > 100%

Now the handheld that would have been cool in my opinion would have been a PSP 2 with PSP 2 hardware, a Tegra 2 CPU/GPU, Dual Analogue sticks, mini Blu-Ray drive and 960x480 touch screen. That way Sony could have simply converted a massive amount of PS2 games for the system. Yet it would have had the capability to run Android / IOS style games too. It would have sold very well and cost less to produce than the Vita. Did I say it would have had a zillion games too. Hmm