[iamaustrian]

They had conduit 2(one of the best looking wii game) running on the 3ds without any sacrifices.

[IrishNinja]

Yes, but that was for battery life, not for extra processing. When the game was running, it shut off Street Pass and Spot Pass.

Star Fox 64 3D's single player mode did this as well, IIRC.

do any other games do this? good to know i'm missin' potential streetpasses when playing em!
for real though, i should click wifi off more often when at home/work but i just forget.

[Luigiv]

They had conduit 2(one of the best looking wii game) running on the 3ds without any sacrifices.

Not even close but opinions aside, the Conduit is actually a weird case whose rendering style plays better to the 3DS's strength than the Wii's.

The GCN an Wii's strength lies in it's ability to push huge poly counts with plenty of texture layers (by comparison to other 6th gen/equivalent systems) but it's weakness is that those texture layers have to be the ones built into the TEV. Since the TEV's feature set did not include normal mapping and other advance modern shaders, to implement them into the Conduit, HVS had to render them in Software on the CPU and then send them to the GPU be baked into an environment map. For whatever reason this killed the System's poly pushing prowess and would have left little CPU power for game logic and other essential functions. Essentially the engine was an incredibly inefficient use of the hardware and didn't play to it's strengths.

By comparison the 3DS can do all the advance shaders that HVS implemented into the Conduit (and more) directly on the GPU without affecting it's Poly count as drastically and without eating into the decidedly scarce CPU resources. As such, the conduits assets are a perfect fit for the 3DS. They were exactly the sort of assets the system was designed to run in the first place. Low poly but highly shaded graphics with simple game logic.

By comparison a game like Xenoblade, that does not attempt to push the boundaries of the Wii's shading ability but instead focuses on leveraging the system's poly power, would have to to be downgraded to hell and back to be made to run on the 3DS.

[tkscz]

Not quite that simple. There are certain features that have to run in the background. They could open up a bit more, but it honestly wouldn't make much of a different.

What features have to run? I'm pretty sure what ever it is, all it would need is a firmwear update. Or maybe I'm wrong.

[DCKing]

I was under the impression that the 3DS has a fairly decent GPU that outpaces Flipper in the GameCube in many respects, but that the CPU is not anywhere close to the GameCube CPU. Despite being a dual core, the ARM chips don't perform nearly as good for the same clockspeed, and one of the cores still has to do OS duty too.

Also, the raw figures mentioned before aren't correct. I posted this table based on more recent info from DMP a while ago.

     | Fillrate (MPixels/sec) | Geometry (millions of polygons/sec)
-------------------------------------------------------------------
3DS  |        1068            |               20.43 
Cube |         648            |               20.25
Wii  |         972            |               30.38

These raw figures are probably not comparable anyway. Nintendo undersold the capabilities of the GameCube and Wii, and I doubt DMP has done so for their own GPU.

[wsippel]

It seems to me that numbers don't tell the whole story, however. There seems to be a bottleneck with the 3DS that is holding it back.

It's not a bottleneck, the figures on Wikipedia are simply wrong. The correct figures are on DMP's website. At 268MHz, the GPU performs in line with Flipper, but 3D comes with a pretty heavy performance impact, as everything is essentially rendered twice. There have been rumors that the same SDK update unlocking the second core also introduced a number of optimizations to improve performance when rendering S3D - might be related to DMP's 3DSquare technology.

One thing the 3DS definitely has over Nintendo's home consoles is a GPU with vertex shader units. On Gamecube and Wii, the CPU had to handle that stuff. The ARM11 MPCore isn't as powerful as a 750CXe, but that alone should largely offset the difference.

[DonMigs85]

Is the GPU really 268 MHz? I always assumed it was around 133 MHz only.
If it's really 268 then it certainly has way more fillrate than either PSP or GCN.

[Mr. Pointy]

I remember in another thread, someone determined that the 3DS can do the same geometry (~20 million triangles / second) as the GC, but using the 3D effect halves that amount. The shaders are much better of course.

NM, what DCKing said.

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthre...amecube&page=9

I remember seeing the first Kid Icarus video at E3 2010 and the game was, and still is, PS2 geometry with modern shaders and lighting.

[DCKing]

Is the GPU really 268 MHz? I always assumed it was around 133 MHz only. If it's really 268 then it certainly has way more fillrate than either PSP or GCN.

It was 133 MHz in the devkit leak by IGN, but apparently Nintendo upped the ante when they enabled stereoscopic 3D.

[DonMigs85]

It was 133 MHz in the devkit leak by IGN, but apparently Nintendo upped the ante when they enabled stereoscopic 3D.

Ah, then it's probably largely responsible indeed for the mediocre battery life.

[CrunchinJelly]

Everything I've played/seen on 3DS seems about Dreamcast level with some more modern lighting systems in place, really.

It's disappointing, especially when you consider the low resolution of the top screen.

[Mr Swine]

Everything I've played/seen on 3DS seems about Dreamcast level with some more modern lighting systems in place, really. It's disappointing, especially when you consider the low resolution of the top screen.

Geometry wise maybe, but we have only seen first gen 3DS games so far. Also the 3DS spanks DC, PS2, GC and Wii but when it comes to everything else than Geometry output

[DonMigs85]

Oh, it's definitely way better than Dreamcast. In terms of geometry and texture filtering that system didn't age very well at all.

[CrunchinJelly]

Oh, it's definitely way better than Dreamcast. In terms of geometry and texture filtering that system didn't age very well at all.

You're confusing Dreamcast games with Dreamcast PSone ports. There is a large difference.

[DonMigs85]

You're confusing Dreamcast games with Dreamcast PSone ports. There is a large difference.

It's just that the mipmap filtering was pretty harsh in a lot of DC games, particularly Skies of Arcadia. It was also noticeable in other games like Soul Calibur.

[Shion]

Well, Dreamcast died too soon. We never got to see how 2nd generation games would look on the console. One thing's for sure though, Dreamcast had no problem with texture filtering. In fact, this was one of its biggest strengths. Everything looked extremely solid. The problem with Dreamcast was in the lack of transparencies and post-processing effects.

[MrVargas]

Watching people compare current systems/graphics to older systems is extremely annoying because some people are really just making judgements based on memories and not on reality. As someone who has owned and played a N64 and Dreamcast in the recent past, the fact that anyone would try and argue that the 3DS is an N64+ is absurd. The Dreamcast comparison is not too bad but from the 20+ Dreamcast games I was playing last summer, it's pretty clear that the 3DS is on a higher tier hardware-wise.

[jett]

Just by looking at the games on both platforms you can tell the 3DS is considerably behind the GC.

[dark10x]

I don't think you could compare like this. Let the 3DS have his Smash Brothers, Metroid Prime or others to see if it compare. For the moment, 3DS also pulled impressive games like Resident Evil: Revelations... which is in 3D, so two scenes to render. We can also talk about Dead or Alive Dimensions, which runs at 60FPS, have a great polycount and large stages.

The fact that it is in 3D isn't that impressive. It's simply rendering two 400x240 images both looking at the same scene.

DOA drops to 30 fps when you switch to 3D as it has to render 800x240 for 3D.

The load of 3D isn't as severe as people seem to think. There is a reason why Nintendo selected such a low resolution for the system.

I'm not saying those games aren't impressive looking, rather, there are many MORE impressive games on Gamecube that were released within a similar time frame.

Watching people compare current systems/graphics to older systems is extremely annoying because some people are really just making judgements based on memories and not on reality. As someone who has owned and played a N64 and Dreamcast in the recent past, the fact that anyone would try and argue that the 3DS is an N64+ is absurd. The Dreamcast comparison is not too bad but from the 20+ Dreamcast games I was playing last summer, it's pretty clear that the 3DS is on a higher tier hardware-wise.

Absolutely. I spend a lot of time playing older systems and it's very clear that the 3DS is a massive leap over the N64 and Dreamcast. Having gone back to several Gamecube games, however, I really don't feel that it routinely matches. A few of its top games could pass as Gamecube titles but most fall pretty short.

[Luigiv]

The fact that it is in 3D isn't that impressive. It's simply rendering two 400x240 images both looking at the same scene. DOA drops to 30 fps when you switch to 3D as it has to render 800x240 for 3D. The load of 3D isn't as severe as people seem to think. There is a reason why Nintendo selected such a low resolution for the system. I'm not saying those games aren't impressive looking, rather, there are many MORE impressive games on Gamecube that were released within a similar time frame.

The part in bold is almost completely irrelevant. The actual strain on the hardware is identical regardless of whether the 2 views are looking at the same scene or different scenes. The only part where looking at the same scene may be an advantage is that both scenes use the exact same assets so you don't need to load anything more into the RAM then you would for a single view. However, rendering 2 views of 2 completely different scenarios isn't a particularly likely situation for a game to be in regardless. Most split screen games I've seen do not bother with any data streaming and instead load the entire level into RAM so even though the two views are looking at different parts of the level, the RAM load has not been increased over single view.

[EuropeOG]

The fact that it is in 3D isn't that impressive. It's simply rendering two 400x240 images both looking at the same scene.

So what if it's the same scene? It's double the resolution. Try running a PC game with double the pixels you normally do.

And I'm not even 100% if it's that simple as it renders the scene at a slightly different angle for both, and increases the field of view slightly.

[GhostTrick]

Everything I've played/seen on 3DS seems about Dreamcast level with some more modern lighting systems in place, really. It's disappointing, especially when you consider the low resolution of the top screen.

That means you never played Resident Evil Revelations.

[abasm]

Does anyone here know what sort of AA the 3DS implements in certain games in 2D mode? (Ocarina and RE:R come to mind.) It was easy enough to see in Ocarina that detail was added in distant objects in 2D, which leads me to believe that some sort of SSAA was in use. (also, many of the official screen shots were released at 800x480.)

[DonMigs85]

Does anyone here know what sort of AA the 3DS implements in certain games in 2D mode? (Ocarina and RE:R come to mind.) It was easy enough to see in Ocarina that detail was added in distant objects in 2D, which leads me to believe that some sort of SSAA was in use. (also, many of the official screen shots were released at 800x480.)

Revelaitons definitely looks like it's using super-sampling in 2D mode.

[GhostTrick]

I really hope Nintendo will show some new games at E3. And by new games, I mean 1st party new gen games.

[dark10x]

So what if it's the same scene? It's double the resolution. Try running a PC game with double the pixels you normally do. And I'm not even 100% if it's that simple as it renders the scene at a slightly different angle for both, and increases the field of view slightly.

Yes, it is double the resolution...but that resolution is still only 800x240. That is not significantly higher than the 640x480 the Gamecube produces. Most 3DS games compensate for this by running at 30 fps where as 60 fps was much more common on Gamecube.

[LeleSocho]

Yes, it is double the resolution...but that resolution is still only 800x240. That is not significantly higher than the 640x480 the Gamecube produces. Most 3DS games compensate for this by running at 30 fps where as 60 fps was much more common on Gamecube.

In fact the Gamecube resolution is higher (307200 GC at 640*480 vs 192000 3DS at 800x240)

[Fabrik]

I really hope Nintendo will show some new games at E3. And by new games, I mean 1st party new gen games.

Yeah me too! But the scary thing is that they don't need too. They have yet to release:

- Paper Mario
- Fire Emblem
- NSMB2
- Animal Crossing
- Luigi's Mansion 2
- Brain Training Devil Mode

They don't really need to show new games for the rest of the year but I want them too. We know about those games for too long already.

[GhostTrick]

Yeah me too! But the scary thing is that they don't need too. They have yet to release: - Paper Mario - Fire Emblem - NSMB2 - Animal Crossing - Luigi's Mansion 2 - Brain Training Devil Mode They don't really need to show new games for the rest of the year but I want them too. We know about those games for too long already.

You're right. But I really hope 1 game that would be a nice showcase for 3DS capabilities.

[ElFly]

Yes, it is double the resolution...but that resolution is still only 800x240. That is not significantly higher than the 640x480 the Gamecube produces. Most 3DS games compensate for this by running at 30 fps where as 60 fps was much more common on Gamecube.

To be fair

800 * 240 = 192 000
640 * 480 = 307 200

The GC moves more than 50% of the 3DS.

The double rendering aspect may impact the polygon pushing performance, but from what I remember from reading about the PS3's 3D mode, when done correctly, 3D only has a x1.4* impact on performance, not a x2.0.


e: forgot about the second screen

(320 * 240) + (800 * 240) = 268 800

Not as wide an advantage for GC, but still
*this number is from memory, the important part is that is not 2

[Easy_D]

It's basically 800x240, 400x240 to each eye. Obviously you also have the bottom screen which is 320x240.

Got my horizontals and verticals confused there for a sec. :P

It does?

Yes.
Have you seen gameplay of the second and or played the first one?
Considering it was a launch title and still looks better says a lot :P

[Fafalada]

Nintendo undersold the capabilities of the GameCube and Wii

Nintendo never publicly stated anything regarding GCN or WII low-level specs. They eventually did leak out, and if people translating screenshots into MPolys feel that those numbers are modest, that's just an arbitrary observation.

Ultimately spec comparisons always focus on GPU, ignoring that 90% (if not more) of PS2 generation software was/is CPU limited (and that includes the Wii). Which doesn't say much by itself - but when you're talking down-ports (from CPU perspective), GPU won't be a differentiator.

[BurntPork]

Nintendo never publicly stated anything regarding GCN or WII low-level specs. They eventually did leak out, and if people translating screenshots into MPolys feel that those numbers are modest, that's just an arbitrary observation. Ultimately spec comparisons always focus on GPU, ignoring that 90% (if not more) of PS2 generation software was/is CPU limited (and that includes the Wii). Which doesn't say much by itself - but when you're talking down-ports (from CPU perspective), GPU won't be a differentiator.

Nintendo gave full specs and a polygon per second number for GCN.

[Cow Mengde]

Nintendo never publicly stated anything regarding GCN or WII low-level specs.

Nintendo definitely gave out specs for the GC. They listed the polygon count at 10-12 million with all effects.

[M3d10n]

The polygon throughput is about the same as the GC, but the 3D halves it. The performance impact of 3D should be similar to running a game in split screen, GPU-wise.

The biggest bottleneck in the 3DS, compared to the GC, is the CPU. That's why RE:M skipped animation frames on distant enemies and why RE:R slows down while loading stuff.

BTW, when comparing RE:R to RE:4 let's not forget the massive difference in budget between both games. It plays a big role in how much the developers can keep pushing the hardware during development.

As example, all cutscenes in RE:R are FMVs because Capcom could avoid coding in facial animation and the streaming features needed by real-time cutscenes. The same thing happened when RE4 was ported to the PS2.

Ah, the character models in RE:R are definitely as good as RE4 gameplay models, as seen in the raid mode model viewer. Also, they exactly the same models (even the textures) used in the FMV cutscenes.

[grimshawish]

You're right. But I really hope 1 game that would be a nice showcase for 3DS capabilities.

Luigi's Mansion 2 was looking mighty fine last I heard!

[Fafalada]

Nintendo definitely gave out specs for the GC. They listed the polygon count at 10-12 million with all effects.

GCN or WII low-level specs.

The kind that have a purpose beyond marketing.

[GhostTrick]

The polygon throughput is about the same as the GC, but the 3D halves it. The performance impact of 3D should be similar to running a game in split screen, GPU-wise. The biggest bottleneck in the 3DS, compared to the GC, is the CPU. That's why RE:M skipped animation frames on distant enemies and why RE:R slows down while loading stuff. BTW, when comparing RE:R to RE:4 let's not forget the massive difference in budget between both games. It plays a big role in how much the developers can keep pushing the hardware during development. As example, all cutscenes in RE:R are FMVs because Capcom could avoid coding in facial animation and the streaming features needed by real-time cutscenes. The same thing happened when RE4 was ported to the PS2. Ah, the character models in RE:R are definitely as good as RE4 gameplay models, as seen in the raid mode model viewer. Also, they exactly the same models (even the textures) used in the FMV cutscenes.

Is it the CPU itself, or because it has one core locked ?

[Cow Mengde]

The kind that have a purpose beyond marketing.

What are you even talking about? You said they never gave out specs for the GC and Wii and we're telling you Nintendo definitely gave out specs of the GC. It happened in Space World 2001 or sometime around then.

[LeleSocho]

Is it the CPU itself, or because it has one core locked ?

The 3ds hasn't a CPU with 2 core which one of these is locked but two CPU single core which one is used for the OS.
Both CPU aren't at the level of the GC one.

[GhostTrick]

The 3ds hasn't a CPU with 2 core which one of these is locked but two CPU single core which one is used for the OS. Both CPU aren't at the level of the GC one.

You sure it isn't a dual core ? Even if it's not level of the GC one, can't both reach the same level used at the same time ?

[blu]

The 3ds hasn't a CPU with 2 core which one of these is locked but two CPU single core which one is used for the OS.

ds/dsi have two separate CPUs. 3ds has a multi-core cpu (it has a dedicated unit for maintaining cache coherency among the L1 caches).

[LeleSocho]

You sure it isn't a dual core ? Even if it's not level of the GC one, can't both reach the same level used at the same time ?

IIRC the 3ds have two ARM11 and they shouldn't achieve what the Gekko can do.
Edit: ah ok my bad i was wrong.

[Luigiv]

Does anyone actually know how Gekko and individual ARM11 MPcores (including VFPU) would compare to each other clock for clock in a gaming situation? Like are they close or would one have a clear advantage?

[GhostTrick]

IIRC the 3ds have two ARM11 and they shouldn't achieve what the Gekko can do. Edit: ah ok my bad i was wrong.

Even if it was wrong, does it change something ?

[blu]

Does anyone actually know how Gekko and individual ARM11 MPcores (including VFPU) would compare to each other clock for clock in a gaming situation? Like are they close or would one have a clear advantage?

Scalar FPU-wise, ARM11's fpu (VFP11) is properly pipelined, so it actually performs better at scalar code than its successor A8. In this regard VFP11 can be close clock-per-clock with Gekko's fpu. In every other aspect though Gekko is better - it's superscalar and (alas limited) out-of-order (ARM11 is neither), it has fpu vector extensions (2-way single-precision) and dedicated scalar conversion instructions that, when used in conjunction with Gekko's cache locking and partitioning mechanism can feed cpu/fpu data directly to the GPU (or arbitrary other mmapped devices). Basically, Gekko is the better game-console CPU. When it comes to handhelds, though, you can't beat ARM's power efficiency. .. Ok, perhaps 603e/e300 could, but that's a boat long missed.

[Shion]

Scalar FPU-wise, ARM11's fpu (VFP11) is properly pipelined, so it actually performs better at scalar code than its successor A8. In this regard VFP11 can be close clock-per-clock with Gekko's fpu. In every other aspect though Gekko is better - it's superscalar and (alas limited) out-of-order (ARM11 is neither), it has fpu vector extensions (2-way single-precision) and dedicated scalar conversion instructions that, when used in conjunction with Gekko's cache locking and partitioning mechanism can feed cpu/fpu data directly to the GPU (or arbitrary other mmapped devices). Basically, Gekko is the better game-console CPU. When it comes to handhelds, though, you can't beat ARM's power efficiency. .. Ok, perhaps 603e/e300 could, but that's a boat long missed.

Interesting.

So, how does this effect game design? What design aspects would be more difficult to achieve on the 3DS compared to GC?

[zoukka]

It's not even a competition.

[EuropeOG]

Yes, it is double the resolution...but that resolution is still only 800x240. That is not significantly higher than the 640x480 the Gamecube produces. Most 3DS games compensate for this by running at 30 fps where as 60 fps was much more common on Gamecube.

I know the resolution is lower than the Gamecube's, in fact that probably helps 3DS produce Gamecube like graphics despite not being as powerful in certain areas.

[blu]

Interesting. So, how does this effect game design? What design aspects would be more difficult to achieve on the 3DS compared to GC?

Please don't misunderstand me - everything more advantageous/interesting Gekko had was not something which was used at the flip of a compiler switch - game engines had to be written to take advantage of the SIMD extensions and the L1 locking/DMA paths. So basically everything outside of Gekko's superscalarity, out-of-order-ness and L2 took hard dev labor. That said, some studios took full advantage of what Gekko offered and their products showed that. In comparison ARM11 (in its common variants) is a tad bland cpu (in the context of game development), though people also did surprising things on the OG iPhone (i.e. skinning/tweening with tangential bumpmapping). But Gekko definitely had more to offer to game devs who were willing to walk the extra mile.