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sc94597 on 19 February 2015
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curl-6 said:
sc94597 said:

Your argument was that at the higher resolution (3d) the 3ds would have trouble and might have to run at 30fps. The higher vram is the crucial factor which will allow it to render the game at the higher resolution (in addition to processing power.) The 3ds GPU supports 15 mil polygons per second and the Gamecube about 20mil/sec. I doubt Metroid Prime did such though, as there are always CPU and memory bottlenecks. If the developer makes a good port that would mean those bottlenecks would be eliminated (due to 3DS's ram and CPU advantages) and the GPU could be used to its max potential. The extra vram would also allow the gpu to maintain higher res textures. 

But what if the original game isn't very bottlenecked to begin with? Sure, no game is completely without them, but that would go for the port too. GCN does have a higher polygon ceiling than 3DS.

The CPU is one area where I confess I am stumped. New 3DS is apparently a quad core ARM11 at 268MHz, but with one core reserved for the OS. Wii is a single core PPC750 at 729MHz. It would depend on which was more efficient per clock cycle, the benefits of three slower cores versus one faster one, etc.

We both agree that there are always bottlenecks: memory size, memory bandwidth, or cpu bottlenecks will hinder the advancement of certain games. Now a port will likely have many more bottlenecks than the original, so that is a point against the New 3DS running the game ( a good port can have fewer if the system is capable though.) The major point I'm getting across is that we don't know if Metroid Prime maxed the GC's polygon capablities. Nevertheless, the game should run at the higher resolution (if it can run at the lower resolution at 60fps) just because the New 3DS has more video ram than the original 3DS. Likely in Ironfall's case the game could run at something like 50fps-60fps in 3D, and they chose to lock it at 30 fps to reduce artifacts (frame doubling and stuttering.) 

Here is what I found from Wikipedia on the MIPS.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructions_per_second 

IBM-Motorola PowerPC 750

525 MIPS at 233 MHz, so about 1575 MIPS at 700 mhz. 

ARM11

515 MIPS at 412 MHz 

Now I asume the ARM is for a single core. Three cores will not give a 100% boost per core. If we assumed 100% though, that would be 804 Mhz, or something around 1,000 MIPS. 

Of course this is a very rough estimate. I also found another estimate for a 4 core ARM11 at about 3200 MIPS for 700mhz, which seems to go with this 1000 MIPS estimate. I think it is safe to say the Wii CPU > New 3DS CPU > GC CPU >/= 3DS CPU though, if we ignore certain other factors.