While final specifications of the chip that will end up in production for Nintendo’s anticipated handheld the 3DS will remain unclear until announced, murmurs and comparisons have begun. DMP has confirmed that their GPU, the PICA200, which utilizes a proprietary 3D drawing technology for stereoscopic images called MAESTRO, will be used in the 3DS. Now everybody and their grandma knows about this chip and has been crunching the numbers. So, let’s get to it.
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The GPU runs at 200MHz, has a clock cycle of 4 pixels per clock, pumping out 800 million pixels per second; or a peak performance of 15.3 million polygons per second. At a high performance frame rate of 60 fps, this is roughly 250,000 polygons per second. In a stereoscopic application, such as the 3DS, this is again reduced 125,000 polygons per second. This is only slightly higher than the current DS’ capability (roughly 123,000 polygons per second– while the PSP churns out a whopping 33 million polygons per second).
Not surprisingly, the GPU utilizes OpenGL ES and support 32 and 16 bit PNG pixel formats, like a lot of portable devices. Also, DMP’s technology includes a lot of ‘on-board’ rendering capabilities. Certain particle, skinning, and shading rendering functions are integrated, making it a much more robust system.
The PICA200 also boasts low power consumption, so expect the battery life to be around the same or slightly more than the DSi.
With all of this information now available, the tendency is to shrug off its performance capacity (in realistic terms it is comparable– not better nor worse really– than either the DS, PSP, or iPhone). Unannounced tweaks to the chipset aside, the 3DS is unique. It’s 3D aspect can not be ignored. The impact it will have on how games are made and experienced will be incredibly significant.
Creamy
4 Comments
You divide 15.3 mill poly per second, by 60 frames. And then claim that as a new per second rate?
That makes no sense. they are completely different units….
The PICA ship can do 250,000 poly’s per frame. The chip is still about 14x faster than the DS.
Yeah Nintendo have said that the 3ds will be able to reach graphics levels of the wii so dont know what your on about lol. this is waaay faster than the ds
Hi. There. Check. Your. Math. Again. It’s. 30 Million. Pollygons. Per. Second. And. 1.6. Billion. Pixels. Per. Second
This article has some terrible mistakes, as people have already pointed out. Why don’t you correct it? Unless you want to mislead people?
I mean how can you say it does 15.3M polys per second, then devide that by 60 and claim it does that number per second… It does that number every 60th of a second obviously.
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