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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - 3DS uses DMP's PICA(R)200 chip

hmm the chip's geometry power seems a bit low (15.3 Million vertexes/s@200Mhz) but the pixel fill rate is very good (800 million pixels/s) and if this patent diagram is to be believed the 3DS has two of these puppies.

that means that total performance is very high and defiantly beats out the PSP and if Nintendo use chips clocked at 400Mhz (the max for the chip) the performance is above the Gamecube, I have added a table that compares some devices, the 3DS numbers would be about the same if they use 1 GPU @ 400Mhz and about half if they use 1 @ 200Mhz. 

  3DS DS PSP Iphone 3GS
GPU 2* DMP Pica 200 @ 200 MHz Nintendo Proprietary Sony Proprietary powerVR SGX535
Vertex Performance (Triangles per Second) 30.6 Million 120 Thousand 33 Million 28 Million
Fillrate (Pixels per Second) 1.6 Billion 30 Million 664 Million 500 Million

as you can see the fill rate per 200Mhz PICA 200 chip is higher than the max filtrate of the PSP (actual performance is probably lower as the PSP utilises the CPU heavily to generate graphics as it's an early system on a chip without proper dedicated GPU component) and if the patent diagram holds true will be well over double, much of that will probably be eaten up by the stereoscopic 3D. well doing research I also found that power consumption is ~1mW per 1Mhz which is very good.



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zarx said:

hmm the chip's geometry power seems a bit low (15.3 Million vertexes/s@200Mhz) but the pixel fill rate is very good (800 million pixels/s) and if this patent diagram is to be believed the 3DS has two of these puppies.

that means that total performance is very high and defiantly beats out the PSP and if Nintendo use chips clocked at 400Mhz (the max for the chip) the performance is above the Gamecube, I have added a table that compares some devices, the 3DS numbers would be about the same if they use 1 GPU @ 400Mhz and about half if they use 1 @ 200Mhz. 

  3DS DS PSP Iphone 3GS
GPU 2* DMP Pica 200 @ 200 MHz Nintendo Proprietary Sony Proprietary powerVR SGX535
Vertex Performance (Triangles per Second) 30.6 Million 120 Thousand 33 Million 28 Million
Fillrate (Pixels per Second) 1.6 Billion 30 Million 664 Million 500 Million

as you can see the fill rate per 200Mhz PICA 200 chip is higher than the max filtrate of the PSP (actual performance is probably lower as the PSP utilises the CPU heavily to generate graphics as it's an early system on a chip without proper dedicated GPU component) and if the patent diagram holds true will be well over double, much of that will probably be eaten up by the stereoscopic 3D. well doing research I also found that power consumption is ~1mW per 1Mhz which is very good.

If it has 2 chips, it is unbeleivable. BTW, isn't the Gamecube Flipper GPU clocked at 162MHz and the Wii's ATI Hollywood is clocked at 236Mhz? If it uses 400Mhz of clock frequency from both chips then it should be more powerful than a Wii reaching Xbox360 graphics.



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3DS crushes DS for sure.

The system is very powerful and it's good to see it's cheap because the technology is 4 to 3 years old, so expect the 3DS not to be that expensive.

Would you prefer really to pay an expensive price for... the latest technology or pay lower for a more aged technology that is working better?



guiduc said:

3DS crushes DS for sure.

The system is very powerful and it's good to see it's cheap because the technology is 4 to 3 years old, so expect the 3DS not to be that expensive.

Would you prefer really to pay an expensive price for... the latest technology or pay lower for a more aged technology that is working better?

I think much of the 3ds' production cost depends heavily on how expensive the 3d screen is. 



Christian973 said:
zarx said:

If it has 2 chips, it is unbeleivable. BTW, isn't the Gamecube Flipper GPU clocked at 162MHz and the Wii's ATI Hollywood is clocked at 236Mhz? If it uses 400Mhz of clock frequency from both chips then it should be more powerful than a Wii reaching Xbox360 graphics.


with GPUs especially the clock rate (Mhz) is not really a good measure of performance unless you are comparing to GPUs of the same architecture (a Pica 200 @ 400Mhz is about twice as powerful as one at 200Mhz but there could be a GPU @ 200Mhz that is faster), this is because modern GPU's rely on parallelism (heaps of simple 'cores' doing tasks at the same time) the xbox 360's GPU is only clocked at 500Mhz but is about 10* more powerful than the Xbox 1's GPU at 233 for example. It can get very confusing lol but you get used to it.

but yes with a fill rate 648 million pixels/s and 20.25 million triangles the game cube is about the same level as one Pica 200 @ 200Mhz with 800m P/s and 15m triangles. the Pica has slightly better fillrate and almost as high geometry rate so if the 3DS has 2 @ 200Mhz or one clocked at 400Mhz it would actually be much more powerful than the Gamecube.



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a few other notes

I think the fact that in a few months Konami managed to get a real time demo of snake eater with what appears to be assets from that game/peace walker running smoothly, is very promising for the future. If that's what they can do in a few months and old assets (optimised for the strengths of another console) imagine what they will be able to do in a year or two more.

And I also find it interesting that Sony seems to favour geometry over fillrate, where as Nintendo seem to be the opposite. of course with the 3DS that makes sense as filtrate is very important when drawing every frame twice.



@TheVoxelman on twitter

Check out my hype threads: Cyberpunk, and The Witcher 3!


zarx said:

hmm the chip's geometry power seems a bit low (15.3 Million vertexes/s@200Mhz) but the pixel fill rate is very good (800 million pixels/s) and if this patent diagram is to be believed the 3DS has two of these puppies.

that means that total performance is very high and defiantly beats out the PSP and if Nintendo use chips clocked at 400Mhz (the max for the chip) the performance is above the Gamecube, I have added a table that compares some devices, the 3DS numbers would be about the same if they use 1 GPU @ 400Mhz and about half if they use 1 @ 200Mhz. 

  3DS DS PSP Iphone 3GS
GPU 2* DMP Pica 200 @ 200 MHz Nintendo Proprietary Sony Proprietary powerVR SGX535
Vertex Performance (Triangles per Second) 30.6 Million 120 Thousand 33 Million 28 Million
Fillrate (Pixels per Second) 1.6 Billion 30 Million 664 Million 500 Million

as you can see the fill rate per 200Mhz PICA 200 chip is higher than the max filtrate of the PSP (actual performance is probably lower as the PSP utilises the CPU heavily to generate graphics as it's an early system on a chip without proper dedicated GPU component) and if the patent diagram holds true will be well over double, much of that will probably be eaten up by the stereoscopic 3D. well doing research I also found that power consumption is ~1mW per 1Mhz which is very good.

 

Those figures are from 2006 era series chips.  Here's data we have from 2008 (I'd imagine 3DS likely uses a newer variant too)... you'll notice geometry's gotten a decent bump up to 40m tri/sec (well past PSP or GC)... if it has 2 2008 chips clocked at 400 MHz that's 80m tri/sec and a whopping 3.2b pix/sec fillrate!

 



was hoping it'd be ES2 but 1.1 is good enough =P



Christian973 said:
zarx said:

hmm the chip's geometry power seems a bit low (15.3 Million vertexes/s@200Mhz) but the pixel fill rate is very good (800 million pixels/s) and if this patent diagram is to be believed the 3DS has two of these puppies.

that means that total performance is very high and defiantly beats out the PSP and if Nintendo use chips clocked at 400Mhz (the max for the chip) the performance is above the Gamecube, I have added a table that compares some devices, the 3DS numbers would be about the same if they use 1 GPU @ 400Mhz and about half if they use 1 @ 200Mhz. 

  3DS DS PSP Iphone 3GS
GPU 2* DMP Pica 200 @ 200 MHz Nintendo Proprietary Sony Proprietary powerVR SGX535
Vertex Performance (Triangles per Second) 30.6 Million 120 Thousand 33 Million 28 Million
Fillrate (Pixels per Second) 1.6 Billion 30 Million 664 Million 500 Million

as you can see the fill rate per 200Mhz PICA 200 chip is higher than the max filtrate of the PSP (actual performance is probably lower as the PSP utilises the CPU heavily to generate graphics as it's an early system on a chip without proper dedicated GPU component) and if the patent diagram holds true will be well over double, much of that will probably be eaten up by the stereoscopic 3D. well doing research I also found that power consumption is ~1mW per 1Mhz which is very good.

If it has 2 chips, it is unbeleivable. BTW, isn't the Gamecube Flipper GPU clocked at 162MHz and the Wii's ATI Hollywood is clocked at 236Mhz? If it uses 400Mhz of clock frequency from both chips then it should be more powerful than a Wii reaching Xbox360 graphics.

Mhz doesn't work like that, it's how much you can do per clock that matters, a 200Mhz part can outperform an 800Mhz one if it was designed differently for performance vs power draw.



Well, trying to guess performance figures off years old tech releases is probably futile.  Hell even if we had current (45nm) PICA200 chip specs, Nintendo's variant is likely so highly customized they'd be inaccurate as well.  Really, we won't know fillrate or polygon draw until we get a developer leak or Nintendo just gives out specs.

More important imo is confirmation of the Maestro Shader extensions supporting various effects we've seen in the demos; self shadowing, bump maps, normal maps, specular highlights, etc.  Everything may be fixed function, but with the API calls being so clearly simple to implement (especially if they're common in 3rd part E3 demos, which likely had a couple months at most to implement), it means we'll see devs using them often too.  For a mobile device (which tends to get lower budgets and rarely pushes programming envelopes) this is a particularly smart, and I dare say, Nintendo-like move. :)