| VMEfinn said: 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 |
Great job on this!!!!
The question is not whether the 3DS is superior to the PSP (clearly it already is) but how much more superior it is!!! I say that it is at least 2x-2.5x more powerful than the PSP. In terms of gauging where the 3DS is compared to the GCN or Wii, I would say that it falls somewhere in between (powerful enough to satisfy my portable needs IMHO). The arguement whether the system is hindered by the 3D is pretty much nullfied by the fact that PICA200 is meant to dispaly 3D images; hence partly the reason for why Nintendo chose them. This makes the system optimized for 3D use; and the only weakness I find compared to the Wii might be in it's dual-core ARM11 processor which is running uderclocked anywhere between 266MHz or 350MHz; http://www.arm.com/products/processors/classic/arm11/index.php . Overall the system should be pushing anywhere between 15.3-22mil poly/s (PICA200 is running 266MHz) with most effects turned on. This is a little bit better numbers than the GCN http://web.archive.org/web/20080222190252/http://www.segatech.com/gamecube/overview/index.html (it's at 12-15mil poly/s); but behind the Wii which should be pushing 24mil-30mil poly/s. The thing the 3DS has an advantage over the Wii, is a more modern GPU that is able to handle better textures and shaders. 
